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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, May 22, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, May 23, 2014, at 8:00 Saturday, May 24, 2014, at 8:00 Jaap van Zweden Conductor Britten TRUTH TO Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia FROM Peter Grimes, Op. 33a and b POWER Dawn Sunday Morning Moonlight Storm Passacaglia INTERMISSION Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60 (Leningrad) Allegretto Moderato (Poco allegretto) Adagio Allegro non troppo The Truth to Power Festival is made possible with a generous leadership gift from The Grainger Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Richard and Mary L. Gray; U.S. Equities Realty, LLC and the Susan and Robert Wislow Charitable Foundation; Mr. & Mrs. Richard J. Franke; and The Wayne Balmer Grantor Trust. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBEZ 91.5FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Truth to Power Festival. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, RedEye, and Metromix for their generous support as media sponsors of the Classic Encounter series. 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 Benjamin Britten Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, Sussex, England. Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England. Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia FROM Peter Grimes, Op. 33a and b Britten set Peter Grimes, Th e B o r o ghu was the inspiration for Britten’s his fi rst major opera, in a opera. Th e interludes depict more than scenery; small fi shing village that in them we sense the plight of an outsider in could easily be the seaside an unsympathetic society—“he lived from all town of Aldeburgh in mankind apart,” Crabbe writes of Grimes—and Suff olk, which he helped the painful alienation that lies at the heart of all to make famous. Britten Britten’s work. was born some twenty Here’s the synopsis of the opera Britten pro- miles up the coast from vided for the opening-night audience: Aldeburgh, and he eventually established his own music festival In the life of his Suff olk fi shing-town Peter there. [Our cover art work depicts Maggi Grimes fi ts uneasily. He lives alone— Hambling’s Scallop Shell on the Aldeburgh shore. visionary, ambitious, impetuous, poaching Th e sculpture, which celebrates Benjamin and fi shing without caution or care for Britten, is pierced with a line from Peter Grimes consequences, and with only one friend in (see “CSO cover art” on page 1).] Th e sea is a town—the widowed schoolmistress, Ellen powerful presence in Peter Grimes—it dominates Orford. He is determined to make enough Britten’s characters, just as it has controlled life money to ask her to marry him, though too in Aldeburgh (of the fi ve streets that once ran proud to ask her till he has lived down his parallel to the coastline, two are now sub- unpopularity and remedied his poverty. merged). As the fi nal curtain falls, even the individual tragedy of Peter Grimes is washed He fi shes with the aid of an apprentice, away by the great, ceaseless tide. bought, according to the custom of the time, In the orchestral interludes which divide the from the workhouse. In the prologue, he scenes of Peter Grimes, Britten has painted the is chief witness in an inquest on his fi rst sea in all its “terrifi c splendour”—the phrase apprentice and the verdict is accidental of George Crabbe, the Aldeburgh poet whose death. In act 1 he is boycotted but obtains a COMPOSED Moonlight four horns, three trumpets, three 1944–45 April 19 & 20, 1962, Orchestra Hall. trombones, tuba, timpani, side Walter Hendl conducting drum, cymbals, gong, tambourine, FIRST PERFORMANCE xylophone, tubular bells, harp, June 7, 1945; London, England MOST RECENT celesta, strings CSO PERFORMANCES FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES Four Sea Interludes APPROXIMATE Dawn June 9, 10 & 11, 2005, Orchestra Hall. PERFORMANCE TIME November 28 & 29, 1946, Orchestra Manfred Honeck conducting 23 minutes Hall. George Szell conducting July 17, 2013, ravinia Festival. James CSO RECORDING Sunday Morning and Storm Conlon conducting 1967. Jean Martinon conducting. (From July 13, 1946, ravinia Festival. William the Archives, vol. 12: A Tribute to Jean Steinberg conducting INSTRUMENTATION two fl utes and two piccolos, two Martinon) [Four Sea Interludes] November 28 & 29, 1946, Orchestra oboes, two clarinets and e-fl at clarinet, Hall. George Szell conducting two bassoons and contrabassoon, 2 second apprentice, whom Ellen goes to fetch the sea from different vantage points. The inter- for him and promises to care for. In act 2 she lude opens with a clear, high theme—like the discovers he has been using the boy cruelly. fine line dividing the water and the sky at dawn. Led by the rector, the men of the borough go Clarinet and harp arpeggios suggest the spray to investigate his of the waves, while quiet chords in the brass and hut. Frightened, low strings hint of a terrible undercurrent, even Peter takes the in the warming glow of dawn. This music returns boy down the at the opera’s end, to start another day, oblivious scar of a recent to Grimes’s suicide. landslide under Aldeburgh is in Constable country, and, in which he moors the second interlude, Sunday Morning, it’s easy his boat, and the to picture a lone church steeple against the wide boy falls down sky. This is the music that opens act 2: villagers the cliff. When it hurry through town on their way to church; the is discovered that sea sparkles in the sun. Four horns in pairs sound the boy is dead, a the ringing of the bells (they’re later joined by George Crabbe, the hue-and-cry from actual bells). Soon the streets are empty—a cloud Aldeburgh poet whose The the borough sets seems to have covered the sun. Borough was the inspiration out to find Peter, The final act of the opera opens in the calm of for Britten’s opera who commits night, with the moon shining over still waters. suicide by scuttling Moonlight, the third interlude, depicts not only his boat just out of sight of the town. This the sea’s repose (and, in the harp and flutes, the is in the small hours of the morning. The glimmer of the moon on the waves), but also its borough wakes up and goes on with its life underlying menace. The fourth interlude, Storm, as usual. links the two scenes of act 1. Alone, watching fierce clouds approach over the sea, Peter sings: ritten’s interludes are distinct from the rest of the opera (they are to be played What harbor shelters peace, with the curtain down), yet they’re Away from tidal waves, away from storms? Bindispensable to its meaning and impact—in What harbor can embrace that sense, they’re like the prose poems with Terrors and tragedies? which Virginia Woolf introduces each section With her there’ll be no quarrels, of her novel The Waves. After the triumphant With her the mood will stay. premiere of Peter Grimes on June 7, 1945, Britten Her breast is harbor too, realized that the interludes could stand alone as Where night is turned to day. evocative sea pictures, and he selected four to be played as a suite. The extensive passacaglia that The storm breaks and the music rises to a ter- links the two scenes of act 2 is often added at the rible climax. It finally subsides, in slow phrases end, as it is this week, as a powerful postlude. of eerie calm, but Grimes’s equilibrium is upset, The first interlude, Dawn, links the prologue and he soon comes to realize that his dreams are and the first scene of act 1, which opens on a beyond his reach. The concluding passacaglia street by the sea. Britten’s music is both beautiful weaves layer upon layer of ever-changing music and terrifying—it suggests the powerful paint- over a simple theme, introduced by pizzicato ings by J.M.W. Turner, the great English artist low strings and then lingering at the end, after of the nineteenth century who bought several a shattering outburst, suddenly eerily quiet houses so that he could watch the sun rise over and alone. 3 Dmitri Shostakovich Born September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia. Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia. Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 60 (Leningrad) Shostakovich composed Leningrad Symphony. As Sandburg suggested, it most of his seventh was “music written with the heart’s blood.” symphony in Leningrad, Although the members of Leningrad’s most his birthplace, during the prestigious artistic institutions, including siege of the city that the conservatory and the philharmonic, were ultimately took nearly a evacuated that summer, Shostakovich chose million lives—roughly to stay in Leningrad, racing with his family to one-third of its the air raid shelters and returning to his desk at inhabitants—as a result of home to continue his symphony. “Even during hunger, cold, and air air raids he seldom stopped working,” his wife raids. Shostakovich, already a world-famous Nina wrote. “If things began looking too hot, he composer, joined the war eff ort in late June 1941, calmly fi nished the bar he was writing, waited right after the Nazi invasion. His time was until the page dried, neatly arranged what he divided between digging ditches throughout the had written, and took it down with him into the city and making arrangements of light music to bomb shelter.” Th e fi rst movement was completed be played at the front.