Program
One HunDReD TwenTieTH 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, February 10, 2011, at 8:00 Friday, February 11, 2011, at 1:30 Saturday, February 12, 2011, at 8:00 Tuesday, February 15, 2011, at 7:30 riccardo muti Conductor Vadim repin Violin Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35 Allegro moderato Canzonetta: Andante Finale: Allegro vivacissimo VADiM Repin
InTermIssIon Clyne «rewind« First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Hindemith Symphony in e-flat Very lively Very slow Lively— Moderately quick half-note
Saturday evening’s performance is generously sponsored by Margot and Josef Lakonishok. CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines. Steinway is the official piano of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. CommenTs by pHi LLip HuSCHeR
Piotr Tchaikovsky Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Violin Concerto in d major, op. 35
his violin concerto was the Milyukova for the first time; a day Tbest thing to come of a very or two later he proposed. bad marriage. In May 1877, The marriage lasted less than Tchaikovsky received a letter from three months, but it must have Antonina Milyukova, a former seemed a lifetime. Tchaikovsky student he couldn’t remember, who quickly learned to despise said she was madly in love with Antonina—he couldn’t even bring him. Earlier that year, Tchaikovsky himself to introduce her as his had entered into an extraordinary wife—and he was shocked to learn relationship, conducted entirely by that she knew not one note of correspondence, with Nadezhda music. In September, he botched a von Meck, and he found this com- pathetic suicide attempt (he waded bination of intellectual intimacy into the freezing Moscow River and physical distance ideal. In order hoping to contract a fatal chill) and to keep his homosexuality from the then fled to Saint Petersburg. On public, he impulsively seized on October 13, Anatoly, one of the the convenient, though unpromis- composer’s younger twin brothers, ing, idea of marriage to a woman took Tchaikovsky on an extended he didn’t even know. On June 1, trip to Europe. His thoughts Tchaikovsky visited Antonina quickly turned to composing,
ComPosed mosT reCenT aPProxImaTe March–April 1878 Cso PerFormanCe PerFormanCe TIme May 8, 2010; Orchestra Hall; 34 minutes FIrsT PerFormanCe Robert Chen, violin; Ludovic December 4, 1881; Vienna Morlot, conductor Cso reCordIngs 1940; nathan Milstein, FIrsT Cso InsTrumenTaTIon violin; Frederick Stock, PerFormanCe solo violin, two flutes, two conductor; Columbia December 8, 1899; oboes, two clarinets, two 1945; erica Morini, Auditorium Theatre; bassoons, four horns, two violin; Désiré Defauw, Alexandre petschnikoff, trumpets, timpani, strings conductor; RCA violin; Theodore Thomas, conductor 1957; Jascha Heifetz, violin; Fritz Reiner, conductor; RCA
2 confirming what he wrote to observing established traditions, as Nadezhda von Meck during the do the Germans.” He plunged in very worst days: “My heart is at once, and full. It thirsts to pour itself out in found to his music.” He returned to composi- delight that tion cautiously, beginning with the music came works that had been interrupted to him easily. by the unfortunate encounter (Shortly after with Antonina: he completed the he arrived in Fourth Symphony in January 1878 Clarens, he and finished Eugene Onegin the had begun a next month. piano sonata, By March, he had recovered his but it didn’t old strength; he settled briefly in go well and he Clarens, Switzerland, and there, in quickly gave the span of eleven days, he sketched it up.) Each Tchaikovsky with his wife, Antonina Milyukova, 1877 a new work—a violin concerto in day, Kotek D major; he completed the scor- offered advice ing two weeks later. When he on violinistic returned to Russia in late April, matters, and he learned the score there were still lingering difficul- page by page as Tchaikovsky wrote ties—Antonina alternately accepted it. On April 1, when the work was and rejected the divorce papers, and completely sketched, they played even extracted the supreme revenge through the concerto for Anatoly’s of moving into the apartment above twin brother, Modest. Both Yosif his—but the worst year of his life and Modest thought the slow was over. movement was weak. Four days The Violin Concerto was later, Tchaikovsky wrote a new one launched by a visit to Clarens (the original Andante became the from Tchaikovsky’s student and Meditation from Souvenir d’un lieu friend—and possible lover—the cher), immediately began scoring violinist Yosif Kotek, who arrived the work, and unveiled the finished at Tchaikovsky’s door with a product on April 11. Clearly he was suitcase full of music. (Kotek had back on track. been a witness at Tchaikovsky’s New problems awaited wedding.) The next day they played Tchaikovsky, however. Although through Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, the concerto was dedicated to the and Tchaikovsky was immediately great violinist Leopold Auer and taken with the idea of writing a the premiere was already adver- large work for violin and orches- tised for the following March 22, tra. He liked the way that Lalo Auer stunned the composer by “does not strive after profundity, dismissing the piece as unplayable. but carefully avoids routine, seeks Tchaikovsky was deeply wounded, out new forms, and thinks more and the premiere was postponed about musical beauty than about indefinitely. “Coming from such
3 an authority,” Tchaikovsky said, and construction, not content; Auer’s rejection “had the effect of even the most casual listener may casting this unfortunate child of my find it disconcerting that—as with imagination into the limbo of the the popular “Tonight We Love” hopelessly forgotten.” tune in the B-flat piano con- Two years passed. Then one day, certo—the lovely theme with which Tchaikovsky’s publisher informed Tchaikovsky begins vanishes into him that Adolf Brodsky, a young thin air after a few seconds, never violinist, had learned the concerto to return. and persuaded Hans Richter and Hanslick also took offense at the the Vienna Philharmonic to play demanding, virtuosic solo part, it in concert. That performance, writing in terms that crop up in in December 1881, was no doubt reviews of new music to this day: horrible, as the orchestra, under- “The violin is no longer played; it rehearsed and reading from parts is pulled about, torn, beaten black chock full of mistakes, played and blue.” What Hanslick failed pianissimo throughout to avert to notice is the way Tchaikovsky disaster. Reviewing the concerto, has taken care to cushion even the the often ill-tempered critic Eduard most challenging, exhibitionistic Hanslick wrote that, for the first passages in music of unforced time, he realized that there was lyricism and restraint. Even music “whose stink one can hear.” Hanslick admitted that the lovely Tchaikovsky never got over that slow movement made progress in review, and, for the rest of his life, winning him over. But the brilliant it is said, he could quote it by heart. finale, with its driving, folklike Although Hanslick stood by his melodies and very “Russian” second opinion, Auer later admitted that theme over the low bagpipe drone the concerto was merely difficult, of open fifths, was too much for not unplayable, and he taught it him, and he concluded sputtering to his students, including Mischa about wretched Russian holidays Elman and Jascha Heifetz, who and the smell of vodka. Even Auer both played it in Chicago. had to admit that Hanslick’s com- Hanslick’s dislike is hard to ment “did credit neither to his good understand, for this is hardly an judgment nor to his reputation as a inflated, pretentious, and vulgar critic.” “The concerto has made its work, although those are the words way in the world,” he wrote years he used. In fact, Tchaikovsky’s lyric later, after it had, in fact, become gift has seldom seemed so natural, one of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved flowing effortlessly through all works, “and, after all, that is the three movements. If there is any most important thing. It is impos- deficiency here, it is one of form sible to please everybody.”
4 anna Clyne Born 1980, London, England.
«rewind«
ne of our new Mead of Clyne’s compositions, it was OComposers-in-Residence, Anna originally a collaborative project— Clyne has now settled into her in this case, a piece to be danced. apartment on Chicago’s Near North Clyne gravitates to collaboration Side, although she is still trying because, as she puts it, it forces you to figure out the best arrangement to break out of your shell—and of her work desk and piano by the she thrives on the kind of creative front window that overlooks the dialogue it opens. Although she is street. Regardless, this is a distinct known for working with artists in improvement over her previous other disciplines—choreographers, setup in Brooklyn, where she filmmakers, writers, painters—she composed in a gloomy, window- also loves to collaborate with musi- less room in a warehouse down cians in the process of working out the street because she couldn’t fit a the details of a new composition. piano in her apartment. At the moment, she is writing a “I could probably compose any- piece for the Chicago Symphony’s where,” Clyne says, thinking about MusicNOW series—titled Spangled a process that is so consuming that Unicorn, after an anthology of the outside world often disappears. poetry by Noel Coward, it will When she’s deep into a piece, she be premiered on March 21 in the sometimes works through the night, Harris Theater—and she is compos- which is what happened when she ing it specifically for members of was composing < ComPosed InsTrumenTaTIon low metal pipe, laptop), 2005 two flutes and piccolo, two timpani, strings oboes, two clarinets, two FIrsT PerFormanCe bassoons, four horns, two aPProxImaTe February 17, 2005, trumpets, two trombones, PerFormanCe TIme Manhattan School of Music, harp, piano, percussion 7 minutes new york City (bass drum, suspended These are the Chicago cymbal, crotales, ratchet, Symphony’s first snare drum, brake drum, performances of music by xylophone, tam-tam, Anna Clyne vibraphone, sizzle cymbal, 5 by working at a piano, because Unicorn, she has begun to return to she likes the tactile sensation of the acoustic-electronic mix. trying things out on the instru- Clyne was born in London. She ment. Clyne’s music itself is very wrote her first fully notated piece, physical—when she was writ- for flute and piano, at the age of ing < 6 music; primarily the layering of this piece is the way that the city multiple sounds and textures to crept into the music. I remember create one solid unit of sound. As one point when I was sitting at you will hear, the strings are the the piano playing through one driving force behind this music. of the faster sections when a van I started by composing the entire ripped down the adjacent road, framework in the strings. This blasting its siren, fading in pitch structure stems from an alternat- as it disappeared into the night. ing two-chord motif, heard within By coincidence, the pitch matched the opening measures of the work. perfectly the section I was play- Once I had this structure in place, ing, and I added this siren into the I went back to the beginning and horns—long pitches that fell in added layers in the other instru- pitch through the phrase. mental families. These range from long, sustained and warping tones to punchy articulations. I wrote < 7 Paul Hindemith Born November 16, 1895, Hanau, Germany. Died December 28, 1963, Frankfurt, Germany. symphony in e-flat n March 25, 1918, Paul When the Nazis came to power OHindemith was playing through in Germany in 1933, Hindemith Claude Debussy’s string quartet was destined to be branded as with three other German soldiers a degenerate composer, largely when they were told that Debussy because Hitler had walked out had just died in Paris. “It was as if of a performance of Hindemith’s our playing had been robbed of the opera Neues vom Tage (News of breath of life,” he later remembered. the day), scandalized by the sight of a soprano singing from her But we realized for the first bathtub. (For the record, she was time that music is more than merely extolling the joys of mod- style, technique, and the expres- ern plumbing.) “It is obvious that sion of powerful feelings. Music [it] shocked the Führer greatly,” reached out beyond political Hindemith wrote to his publisher boundaries, national hatred, and late in 1934. “I shall write him a the horrors of war. On no other letter . . . in which I shall ask him occasion have I seen so clearly to convince himself to the con- what direction music must take. trary.” But in the meantime, Joseph Goebbels spoke out publicly about That sensibility would drive the horror of modern composers Hindemith’s career from that point “allowing naked women to appear on, and it would govern his every on the stage in obscene scenes in move, almost literally, during the a bathtub, making a mockery of Second World War. the female sex.” Hindemith wasn’t ComPosed mosT reCenT trumpets, three trombones 1940 Cso PerFormanCe and tuba, timpani, bass January 27, 1974; Orchestra drum, snare drum, cymbals, FIrsT PerFormanCe Hall; Sir Georg Solti glockenspiel, triangle, november 21, 1941; conducting tambourine, rute, strings Minneapolis, Minnesota InsTrumenTaTIon aPProxImaTe FIrsT Cso three flutes and piccolo, two PerFormanCe TIme PerFormanCe oboes and english horn, two 36 minutes August 5, 1954; clarinets and bass clarinet, Ravinia Festival; Georg two bassoons and contra- Solti conducting bassoon, four horns, three 8 mentioned by name, but the mes- In February 1940, Hindemith sage was clear. He made a powerful reluctantly left Switzerland, where statement on the value of art—and he had been living for the past two the role of the artist in society—in years, for the U.S. Feeling unsure his opera Mathis der Maler, about of himself and unsettled in his the sixteenth-century German new home at first, he was soon painter Mathias Grünewald, who invited to give a series of lectures was himself torn between his com- at Yale University, and those led mitment to art and a life of politi- to a position as visiting profes- cal activism. That work, too, was sor (Lukas Foss was one of his attacked and eventually banned. students). Teaching was important After Hindemith figured promi- to Hindemith, not only for its nently in the exhibition of Entartete salary and the sense of stability Musik (Degenerate music) in 1938, it provided. “I don’t get ideas just he had little choice but to leave his sitting around waiting for them,” native Germany for good. he once said. “They come from Hindemith had come to the somewhere, and I get them teach- United States for the first time ing.” In no time, ideas did begin to in 1937; he returned in 1938 and flow. His renewed activity teaching 1939, and the letters he wrote and composing was mirrored by a home to his wife Gertrude reveal sudden interest in his music—in a a man struggling to find his country where he had previously place—and a job—in a new world. been almost completely unknown On his first U.S. tour, Hindemith by the general public. appeared as viola soloist in his Der Several major works, including Schwanendreher with members the Symphony in E-flat of 1940 of the Chicago Symphony at the that is performed at this concert, Chicago Arts Club. The next year, a cello concerto also composed in Hindemith made his American 1940, the Symphonic Metamorphosis conducting debut with the CSO, after Themes by Carl Maria von leading his Kammermusik no. 1 and Weber of 1943, and the 1946 the Symphonic Dances. In 1939, Symphonia serena, were all written Hindemith returned to Chicago with the high-powered virtuosity of to attend a concert of his music the American symphony orchestra given by University of Chicago in mind. The work Hindemith students, but he didn’t appear began for the Chicago Symphony’s with the Orchestra. During his anniversary—a kind of free fantasy, visit, however, he met with CSO as he called it, on an old Virginian music director Frederick Stock, ballad about poor Lazarus and the who asked him to write a piece for rich man—was abandoned midway, the Orchestra’s fiftieth anniver- apparently when the composer real- sary, then two seasons away. “The ized he had been so busy writing specifics still need to be discussed,” other pieces that he couldn’t finish Hindemith wrote to Gertrude it in time for the 1940–41 Chicago in March. season. (Fifteen other works 9 commissioned by the CSO came Koussevitzky pulled the premiere through on schedule, including from that winter’s programs—he Kodály’s Concerto for Orchestra claimed there wasn’t adequate time and Stravinsky’s Symphony in C; to prepare the work—causing a Hindemith’s score for Poor Lazarus falling-out between composer and was later published in its incom- conductor that was never repaired. plete state.) If Hindemith originally The symphony was premiered feared he would face a debilitating the next year by the Minneapolis writer’s block living in a strange Symphony Orchestra under Dmitri new country, he had quickly Mitropoulos, where it was well overcome those doubts, and, at the received by critics who noted same time, begun the complicated its ancestry in Beethoven and process of distancing himself from Bruckner, and by an audience that, his native Germany. The requiem according to a local critic, had been “for those we love,” When lilacs last noticeably cool toward “atonal” in the door-yard bloom’d, a setting music in the past. of Walt Whitman’s poetry dating The very fact that Hindemith from 1946—he originally wanted would choose to compose a four- to call it An American Requiem—is movement symphony and include the work in which he finally voiced a key in its title in 1940 (though, his reaction to the Holocaust—his oddly, there is no key signature in main material is derived from the opening measure of the score the Jewish melody “Gaza”—and itself) suggests how he viewed expressed his thanks to the country his place in the chaotic world that had taken him in. of modern music. (Hindemith’s interest in the traditional forms indemith began the Symphony of music was there from the start: Hin E-flat in the summer of among his earliest pieces, written 1940, while he was lecturing in the 1920s, are string quartets at Tanglewood—“for variety’s and the first of his series of cham- sake, I’ve started a symphony,” he ber concertos—the landmark wrote to Gertrude that August. Kammermusik.) Ironically, both It had been commissioned by Stravinsky and Schoenberg intro- Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony, duced new works in classical forms which Hindemith heard regularly in 1940—Stravinsky’s Symphony that summer, and it was tailor-made in C and Schoenberg’s Violin for the orchestra’s brilliant playing. Concerto. Both of those compos- The first movement of the “grown- ers had already taken music down up symphony”—as Hindemith paths Hindemith resisted, and called it once he got going—was their return to the symphony and completed in September, with concerto was a way of putting new each of the subsequent move- wine in old bottles—Schoenberg’s ments following a month at a time. score is a twelve-tone work, When the final pages of the score after all—rather than embracing trickled in just before Christmas, the past. 10 For Hindemith, composing a movement is a scherzo, in both “tonal” symphony was a rallying structure and style (though it is cry. His important 1937 treatise, not so titled), with a contrasting The Craft of Musical Composition, is trio launched by an expansive oboe a declaration of the preeminence solo. The finale, which follows of tonal music. He once said that without pause, begins as a march, music without a tonal center was turns brilliant and brassy, relaxes no more than “a mental activity into an intermezzo, as Hindemith scarcely superior to the invention or calls it, and continues with a grand solution of a crossword puzzle”—a apotheosis. The last pages con- stance that got him into hot water firm Hindemith’s belief that the with the avant-garde and lost him composer cannot escape the pull of the sympathy of a new generation the major triad “any more than the of composers forever. To a great painter his primary colors or the extent, Hindemith’s music still architect his three dimensions.” struggles to overcome its late- After the Symphony in E-flat, twentieth century dismissal as Hindemith continued to write old-fashioned, conservative, even “symphonies” of various kinds, reactionary. Hindemith never saw including one in B-flat for concert himself that way—“only a coward band, the popular Weber meta- retreats into history,” he once morphosis, and finally, in 1958, said—but thought of his finest the Pittsburgh Symphony, which works, such as this E-flat sym- quotes both a Pete Seeger song and phony, as part of a grand, centuries- Webern’s Symphony, op. 21, as if spanning continuum. to embrace the Germanic heritage The first movement, with its he had never completely put behind strong main theme, rhythmic him as well as his status as a U.S. drive, and impressively worked- citizen, with a recently purchased out development, is the kind house in New Haven, Connecticut, of symphonic opening that ties and a newly acquired taste for Hindemith unmistakably to the American culture. grand Germanic musical heritage A postscript. In March 1963, at of his upbringing. The prominence the very end of his life, Hindemith and brilliance of the brass writing returned to conduct the Chicago throughout the work was inspired Symphony Orchestra; he died ten by the sound of the Boston orches- months later. The program was tra that Hindemith had in his the Academic Festival Overture by ear while he was composing. The Brahms, Hindemith’s own Concert slow second movement is broad Music for strings and brass, and and richly melodic. Even Francis Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Poulenc, whose own music came from a completely different tradi- tion, said he loved Hindemith’s lyricism “both heavy and lively, Phillip Huscher is the program annota- like quicksilver.” Hindemith’s third tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Symphony Orchestra © 2011 Chicago 11