Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO
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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 26, 2016, at 8:00 Friday, May 27, 2016, at 1:30 Saturday, May 28, 2016, at 8:00 Sunday, May 29, 2016, at 3:00 Tuesday, May 31, 2016, at 7:30 Cristian Măcelaru Conductor Alisa Weilerstein Cello Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus Duain Wolfe Director Ibert Bacchanale First CSO performances Dusapin Outscape ALISA WEILERSTEIN World premiere Commissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Mrs. Harold C. Smith Fund for New Music Co-commission with Oper Stuttgart and the BBC Symphony Orchestra INTERMISSION Holst The Planets, Op. 32 Mars, the Bringer of War Venus, the Bringer of Peace Mercury, the Winged Messenger Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age Uranus, the Magician Neptune, the Mystic WOMEN OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie. Thursday’s performance is generously sponsored by Terrence and Laura Truax. The Friday matinee performance is generously sponsored by an anonymous donor. CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines. 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 Jacques Ibert Born August 15, 1890, Paris, France. Died February 5, 1962, Paris, France. Bacchanale Jacques Ibert is buried quartet, composed twenty years later, reflects the among the cypress and turmoil and trauma of World War II. chestnut trees in Paris’s At first, Ibert hoped to be an actor, and even Passy Cemetery, in the after he switched to the study of music, his pas- shadow of the Eiffel sion for drama gave his own works an unmistak- Tower. His grave isn’t far ably theatrical quality. At the Paris Conservatory, from those of Gabriel he studied with Émile Pessard, who had taught Fauré and Claude Ravel, and then in Gédalge’s classes, where he Debussy. Fate hasn’t been met Honegger and Milhaud. During World particularly kind to Ibert, War I, Ibert interrupted his studies to serve as especially outside his native France, and since he a nurse and stretcher-bearer on the front lines. died in 1962, his music has nearly slipped from His big career break came in 1919, when he won the repertoire. He is revered neither as a polished the coveted Prix de Rome (on his first try, unlike master such as Fauré nor as a modern visionary Berlioz) for his cantata Le poète et la fée (The poet like Debussy. The fact that he never belonged to and the fairy). any stylistic “school,” such as the flippant, If Ibert is difficult to pigeonhole as a com- headline-grabbing Les six of his friends poser, that’s largely his own doing, for he wrote Honegger and Milhaud, has made it harder to a wide range of music in many genres and for categorize him—and easier to lose sight of him many purposes—from background music for a on the congested roadmap of twentieth-century Paris festival of water and light to cadenzas for music. As a result, he’s often thought of as a Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Under the influence peripheral figure, and even his best work is of his lifelong love for the theater, he wrote sometimes unfairly dismissed as slight seven operas and five ballets, as well as scores or superficial. for radio dramas and incidental music for many But Ibert is a true original, and he was a plays, including his own take on A Midsummer composer of substance from the start. He first Night’s Dream. He turned his uproarious score attracted attention in 1922 with his three-move- for Labiche’s classic farce, An Italian Straw Hat, ment orchestral piece inspired by The Ballad of into a divertissement, one of his most often- Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde’s poem about the played works. He was a natural to write music execution of a convicted murderer from a nearby for film, which he did throughout his career. In cell during his own incarceration on morals 1948, he scored Orson Welles’s Macbeth, and four charges—a work that’s entirely at odds with years later he provided the opening circus ballet Ibert’s reputation for light music. His only string sequence (based on the Pagliacci tale) for Gene COMPOSED INSTRUMENTATION APPROXIMATE 1956 three flutes and piccolo, two oboes PERFORMANCE TIME and english horn, two clarinets and 10 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE bass clarinet, three bassoons and November 2, 1956, broadcast on BBC’s contrabassoon, four horns, three Third Programme trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performances of Ibert’s Bacchanale. 2 Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance, Hollywood’s first bacchanales in Samson and Delilah and in the all-dance film. Venusberg scene of Wagner’s Tannhauser, Ibert’s score is a fulsome riot of color and texture. From he Bacchanale that he composed at the the opening measure, his rhythmic patterns are very end of his career was commissioned insistent and his pace relentless, although the by the BBC for the tenth anniversary mood relaxes temporarily in the middle portion. ofT its radio show, Third Programme, which was TheBacchanale is a far cry from the sober music known for the cultural and intellectual heft of its the BBC was known for broadcasting at the time, programming. Ibert’s contribution is a brilliant but as a celebratory toast and a tribute to the scherzo for full orchestra. Like the famous seductive thrill of orchestral music, it is ideal. Pascal Dusapin Born May 29, 1955, Nancy, France. Outscape, Concerto for Cello and Orchestra For Pascal Dusapin, its long life, Outscape is a reminder that the Outscape, his new cello complex creative process of commissioning, concerto being pre- writing, and preparing new works of music is, miered by the Chicago above all, a powerful and often deeply personal Symphony Orchestra human experience. this week, is the latest Pascal Dusapin was first attracted to music at installment in his an early age, after hearing a jazz trio while on fascination with vacation with his family. He begged to learn the PHOTO BY © PHILIPPE GONTIER PHILIPPE © BY PHOTO exploring the connec- clarinet, but at his father’s insistence he studied tion between music and piano instead, and eventually became infatuated nature. For Alisa Weilerstein, for whom it was with playing the organ. Hearing Edgard Varèse’s written, it has come to be part of a cycle of Arcana, a grand, noisy, utterly individual master- bringing new life into the world this year—her work at the age of eighteen was a revelation; he daughter was born just last month, while knew then that he would devote the rest of his Weilerstein was in the process of learning life to composing. His training and his career Dusapin’s new score, making the relationship proceeded in unconventional yet, for him, utterly between music and life especially meaningful. natural ways. In the 1970s, he abandoned studies (She will introduce yet another cello concerto, with the grand man of French composition, written for her by Matthias Pintscher, later this Olivier Messiaen, after just one year in order year.) As the newest addition to a large list of to work with the iconoclastic Greek composer pieces premiered by the Chicago Symphony over Iannis Xenakis, whom he viewed as the artistic COMPOSED INSTRUMENTATION APPROXIMATE 2014–15 solo cello, three flutes and piccolo, PERFORMANCE TIME two oboes and english horn, two 28 minutes These are the world premiere clarinets and bass clarinet, two performances bassoons and contrabassoon, four Commissioned for the Chicago horns, two trumpets, two trombones, Symphony Orchestra by the Mrs. timpani, glockenspiel, bells, crotales, Harold C. Smith Fund for New Music cymbals, medium and large lam-tams, castanets, bass drum, snare drum, Co-commission with Oper Stuttgart bongos, gongs, temple blocks, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra woodblocks, “pop” bass drum, tambourine, strings 3 descendent of Varèse. Over the years, Dusapin usapin began this new cello concerto with has never been a member of any “school” or a title, An Idea of North, in the back of his fashion, although he has absorbed elements from mind—a reflection of his “conceptual fas- many. As he once said, he learned a great deal Dcination” with the far north mixed with the mem- from Pierre Boulez, but also from the so-called ory of a “crazy” car trip to the limits of the Artic minimalist Steve Reich. Polar Circle that he took when he was twenty-five. Dusapin’s career-spanning stage works suggest (For his temporary title, Dusapin was indebted to the freedom of his imagination and the range of The Idea of North, a short film the Canadian pianist ideas that attract him. Beginning with Romeo Glenn Gould made about his obsession with the and Juliet, a reimagining of the Shakespeare Arctic.) “The more I compose this work,” Dusapin play composed in the mid-1980s, they include told The New York Times in 2014, “the more the Medeamaterial, a companion piece to Purcell’s idea of a desert of snow is present. It’s very calm opera Dido and Aeneas; To Be Sung, a chamber for me—the music is not—but this inspires me.” opera with a libretto by the composer based on But as he got further into the composition process, texts by Gertrude Stein and designed in tan- the more he realized his work wasn’t about any- dem with a light installation by the pioneering thing that concrete.