Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
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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 Wednesday, November 12, 2014, at 6:30 (Afterwork Masterworks, performed without intermission) Pablo Heras-Casado Conductor Alice Sara Ott Piano Boulez Figures-Doubles-Prismes Bartók Piano Concerto No. 3 Debussy Ibéria The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support as a media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterworks series. Thursday, November 13, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, November 14, 2014, at 1:30 Saturday, November 15, 2014, at 8:00 Pablo Heras-Casado Conductor Alice Sara Ott Piano Boulez Figures-Doubles-Prismes First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Stravinsky Four Studies for Orchestra Dance Eccentric Canticle Madrid INTERMISSION Bartók Piano Concerto No. 3 Allegretto Adagio religioso Allegro vivace ALICE SARA OTT Debussy Ibéria In the Streets and Byways The Fragrance of Night— Morning of the Festival Day The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT and RedEye 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 his week, Orchestra Hall belongs to the visionary composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. On Friday and Sunday, he is the focus of a special Beyond the Score: A Pierre Dream, conceived by Gerard McBurneyT with designs by pioneering architect Frank Gehry, a longtime friend of Boulez. And our Chicago Symphony subscription program is one Boulez himself, now our Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus, might well have conducted in his many years on the podium here. Three of the composers on this concert—Stravinsky, Bartók, and Debussy—are those he returned to again and again with the Chicago Symphony. Works by both Bartók and Debussy were on the program the week Boulez made his debut conducting the CSO in 1969. Each of the three pieces on this week’s con- certs is a work that Boulez led more than once in Orchestra Hall (Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto as recently as 2008). And although he conducted several of his own groundbreaking compositions in Chicago, including the US premiere of Livre pour cordes, he never got around to introduc- ing us to the work with which he began his career as a purely orchestral composer, Figures-Doubles-Prismes, which opens our concert this week. Pierre Boulez Born March 26, 1925, Montbrison, Loire, France. Figures-Doubles-Prismes By the time Pierre Boulez reveals his interest in rearranging the players into first appeared with the new groupings on the stage in order to create Chicago Symphony in new sound worlds using a traditional sym- 1969, he was already phonic ensemble. known as one of the Boulez composed the germ of this music, a pioneers of new music, score titled Doubles, in the winter of 1957–58, but he also had recently at the same time that he conducted an orches- emerged as one of the tra in public for the first time. (Stepping in for most important orchestral Hermann Scherchen at the last minute was, as conductors of our time. Boulez later recalled, “like leaping into boiling Reviewing Boulez’s first concert for the Chicago water.”) He was in regular contact in those days Tribune, Peter Gorner wrote: “. there are few with Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was working interpreters more honest than Pierre Boulez. on his groundbreaking Gruppen [Groups], which Honestly depends upon conviction, and Boulez calls for three separate orchestras onstage, each firmly believes in the classics of our century. He with its own conductor. Boulez was moving in also is immensely qualified to spread the word, a different direction, but the fascination was possessing a composer’s mind, a conductor’s the same: the reconsideration of the symphony savvy, and a poet’s soul.” orchestra as a force for new musical activity. At that time, Boulez had just recently com- When the Concerts Lamoureaux commis- pleted work on Figures-Doubles-Prismes. His first sioned Boulez to write his first work for orches- score written exclusively for orchestra, it shows tra, he decided to place the instruments on the how the experience of conducting large orches- stage in an unconventional setup. Inevitably, for tras around the world had triggered his imagina- a piece so radical and unexpected, Doubles was tion and allowed him to rethink the very nature easily dismissed by those who did not understand of orchestral writing. Figures-Doubles-Prismes the relationship between the seating arrangement 2 and the content of the music itself as little more orchestra, as Boulez has written, “reacts like a than a game of musical chairs. A mere eight min- collective and not like a group of individuals.” utes in length, it suggested an entirely new kind of instrumental music, and it boldly said that the oulez later described Figures-Doubles- tradition-bound symphony orchestra could, in Prismes as “a series of variations for large fact, point the way to the future. orchestra—a sort of montage of different Bforms, each embedded in the others.” For Boulez, he reworking of older pieces has been the idea of variation, like the setup of a large a common thread in Boulez’s compos- orchestra onstage, was open to reinterpretation— ing career, and, in 1963, he picked up for him, variation became a kind of dazzling, DoublesT once again and began to reexamine its ever-changing, kaleidoscopic transformation of many ideas and to enlarge upon his original ideas. The title, Figures-Doubles-Prismes, refers not plan. This new work, Figures-Doubles-Prismes, to sections of the piece, but to three descriptive was completed in 1968. The deployment of the characters encompassed in a single expanse of instruments on the stage in Figures-Doubles- music. (Some analysts—clearly not taking their Prismes is very specific, and—unlike that of cue from Boulez himself—have chosen to hear Stockhausen’s Gruppen, for example—it was four different symphonic “movements” in the devised precisely to blend the timbres in new work, with a kind of “scherzo” in second place and ways, not for spatial separation or stereophonic a slow movement third.) In the mid-1960s, Boulez effects. “My intention,” Boulez recently said, himself wrote about the three elements of his title: “was to disperse the wind and brass to the perimeter, with the string group inside, and with Figures refers to simple elements, sharply the percussion section, even though it’s relatively characterized by dynamics, violence, soft- small, staying at the back for reasons of volume.” ness, slowness, and so forth. These elements The full orchestra is divided into three groups can be purely harmonic, or more rhythmi- of woodwinds, four of brass, and five of strings. cally oriented, or purely melodic. They are The demographic makeup of each group differs: not themes in the conventional way, but the first group of winds is made up of three flutes “states” of music being. and two clarinets, while the third wind group is more varied, including one flute, two clarinets, Doubles has two meanings: the first is that of one oboe, one english horn, and one bassoon. the eighteenth-century word doppelgänger, The musical content and the seating arrange- which means a human double. Thus, in the ment are inseparable—the way the music is process of development, each figure may written for specific combinations of instruments have its double, which is related only to it and to create certain blends of different sonorities and no other. makes it impossible to play the piece with the musicians seated in their normal configuration. Prismes occur when the figures or their (Even the score could not be laid out in the doubles refract themselves one through the standard way, but instead stacks the various other. And in this case, one figure becomes groups one on top of the other, like paragraphs the prism, and the other is refracted through on a page.) Figures-Doubles-Prismes is a work of it. By this process, the maximum complexity complex textures and intricate interplay, all the is obtained, and the effect will be compara- more remarkable given that a traditional large ble to that of a kaleidoscope. COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES trumpets, four trombones, tuba, 1957–58, Doubles; expanded into These are the Chicago Symphony timpani, percussion, three harps, Figures-Doubles-Prismes in 1963–64; Orchestra’s first performances. celesta, and strings, arranged in further enlarged in 1968 various groups on the stage INSTRUMENTATION FIRST PERFORMANCE four flutes and four piccolos, three APPROXIMATE March 13, 1968, The Hague. The oboes and english horn, three clarinets PERFORMANCE TIME composer conducting and bass clarinet, three bassoons 20 minutes and contrabassoon, four horns, four 3 Igor Stravinsky Born June 18, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia. Died April 6, 1971, New York City. Four Studies for Orchestra These four studies for 1914, he produced a little piece inspired “by the orchestra are the products surprising results of the mixture of strains from of an unlikely marriage of the mechanical pianos and orchestrinas in the music for string quartet streets and little night taverns of Madrid.” and the piano roll. The In 1928, Stravinsky wrapped these four short first three pieces were pieces together as a set of orchestral studies, with originally written for a newly orchestrated version of the piano-roll string quartet in 1914, piece serving as the finale. He now gave all shortly after the scandal- four works descriptive titles and admitted a few ous premiere of The Rite of additional memories of what had inspired him.