Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director

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 concerts 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. Spring. They had no titles, just tempo markings, The first is a stylized Russian dance, its melody and appeared to be finely crystallized exercises in limited to just four notes repeated in various abstraction, although shortly after the Flonzaley Quartet played them in Chicago, on November 8, 1915, Amy Lowell wrote a poem that attempted to “reproduce the sound and movement of the music as far as is possible in another medium.” Stravinsky began to orchestrate the three pieces almost as soon as they were finished and he made a piano-duet arrangement as well. In the spring of 1916, Stravinsky took his first trip to Spain, where he passed many an evening in local taverns, “listening to the preliminary improvisa- tions of the guitarist and the deep-voiced singer with astonishing breath control singing her long Arab cantilena embellished with fioriture.” The next year, when the Aeolian Company asked him to write something for the pianola, which Members of the Flonzaley Quartet on a walking tour in Stravinsky had seen demonstrated in London in Lausanne, Switzerland

COMPOSED MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE 1914, three pieces for string quartet CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME February 26, 27, 28 & March 3, 10 minutes 1917, additional piece for pianola 2009, Orchestra Hall. Pierre 1928, four pieces orchestrated as Boulez conducting CSO RECORDINGS Four Studies 1992. Pierre Boulez conducting. March 10, 2009, Carnegie Hall. Pierre Deutsche Grammophon Boulez conducting FIRST PERFORMANCE 2009. Pierre Boulez conducting. November 7, 1930; Berlin, Germany INSTRUMENTATION CSO Resound three flutes and piccolo, three oboes FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES and english horn, two clarinets, November 25, 27, 28, 29 & E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, two December 1, 1992, Orchestra Hall. bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, Pierre Boulez conducting three trombones, tuba, piano, harp, timpani, strings

4 permutations over an irregular pulse. Eccentric music—was suggested by the art of the great was inspired by the English clown Little Tich, clown.” The third, Canticle, is a static litany—a who entertained Stravinsky in London in 1914: wonderful kaleidoscope of ever-changing, yet “the jerky, spastic movement, the ups and downs, unmoving parts. The piano roll of Madrid is now the rhythm—even the mood or joke of the given the full-color travel-brochure treatment.

AMY LOWELL ON STRAVINSKY’S THREE PIECES FOR STRING QUARTET

Here are excerpts from the poem Drunkenness steaming in colours; Splashed with cherry petals written by Amy Lowell in 1915, after Red, yellow, blue, falling, falling, she heard the Flonzaley Quartet Colours and flesh weaving together, Claws a grave for himself in the play Stravinsky’s Three Pieces in In and out with the dance, fresh earth Chicago. Stravinsky subsequently Coarse stuffs and hot flesh With his finger-nails. orchestrated them as the first three of weaving together. his Four Studies. . . . THIRD MOVEMENT An organ growls in the heavy FIRST MOVEMENT SECOND MOVEMENT roof-groins of a church, . . . Pale violin music whiffs across It wheezes and coughs. Bang! Bump! Tong! the moon, The nave is blue with incense, Petticoats, A pale smoke of violin music blows Writhing, twisting, Stockings, over the moon, Snaking over the heads of the Sabots, Cherry petals fall and flutter, chanting priests. Delirium flapping its thigh-bones; And the white Pierrot, Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine . . . Red, blue, yellow, Wreathed in the smoke of the violin,

Béla Bartók Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (now part of Romania). Died September 26, 1945, New York City. Piano Concerto No. 3

After the last measure a matter of Bartók writing in the parts. He got of this concerto, Béla within seventeen measures; Serly assumed the Bartók wrote the relatively straightforward task of deciphering the Hungarian word vége composer’s shorthand and filling in the blanks. (the end). This was the Bartók’s last five years, spent entirely in the last score Bartók com- United States, were neither productive nor happy. pleted before he was For two years after his arrival in October 1940, he moved from his 57th wrote nothing new. In April 1942, his health took Street Manhattan a sudden turn for the worse and he never regained apartment to the West his full strength. But Koussevitzky’s commission Side hospital where he died four days later. for the Concerto for Orchestra in May 1943 His friend Tibor Serly visited him on his last rekindled much of Bartók’s old spirit. The music night at home, and he found Bartók propped began to flow. His last year, 1945, marked a new up in bed, surrounded by manuscript pages and high point, except that time ran out. medicine bottles, trying to finish the orchestral For the first time in years, Bartók worked score of his third piano concerto. The great com- on two major pieces at once—the Third Piano poser, weak and near death, was quite literally Concerto and the Viola Concerto that he left fighting the clock, filled with ideas he wouldn’t in sketches on odd scraps of paper. This almost get time to tell us. Bartók’s son Peter had already desperate surge of activity may well have come drawn the bar lines on the paper, so it was simply from a realization of the severity of his illness.

5 When he left his Manhattan apartment for the thanksgiving), the sublime third movement last time, he was sketching a seventh string quar- of the String Quartet, op. 132, written after tet and considering a commission for a double Beethoven recovered from a serious illness. concerto from a two-piano team. Bartók turned (Bartók uses the marking Adagio religioso for to a hospital doctor and said, “I am only sorry the only time in his music; Serly later adopted that I have to leave with my baggage full.” it for the unfinished Viola Concerto.) Like the Bartók knew he would never play his third corresponding movement from Beethoven’s quar- concerto; its solo part is written not in the tet, it has an uncommon serenity and a complete explosive and incisive style that suited his own command of a few perfectly suited materials. The hands—the style of his first two concertos, which strings begin like Beethoven’s, slowly unfolding he often did play—but in a serene and more lyri- and refolding a tiny idea. The piano pronounces a cal vein meant for his wife Ditta (it was intended benediction of eloquent chords. as a birthday gift). The fragile middle section is Bartók’s last At the opening of the Allegretto (the marking evocation of night music. Over string tremolos, is one of the few tempo indications Bartók actu- the piano, oboe, clarinet, and flute trade bird ally wrote in), the piano etches a strong, simple calls—some drawn from Bartók’s own notations melody—one note in each hand, two octaves made while he recuperated the previous year apart, against a murmur in the strings. Although in Asheville, North Carolina. The orchestra is the music rises to moments of enormous energy used sparingly, to wondrous effect. The piano and bristling excitement, the texture remains awakens to the full power of the night, in ripples remarkably uncomplicated and transparent. It’s of sound and cascading chords, but the winds as if Bartók meant for us to hear every note. The restore calm and quiet. The piano plays a lovely left hand of the piano solo often mirrors the right two-part invention, rises to a great climax, and hand or plays the same music in contrary motion. then yields to the infectious pulse of the final The scoring is light—the trombones play in only Allegro vivace. two measures—and there’s much doubling of The finale’s main theme, with its identifying instrumental lines; rarely does Bartók weave a rhythm (short-long, long-short), recurs again dense fabric of many individual voices. To those and again, separated by aggressively fugal who had never understood Bartók’s music, this passages. The movement is lucid and relaxed, new simplicity was dismissed as the sad product even in the most complex counterpoint. Bartók of his weakened condition (just as in the previous is in complete command throughout. There’s no century, Beethoven’s visionary harmonies were mystery surrounding the last seventeen bars; the blamed on his deafness). composer’s shorthand instructions were all Serly The second movement is based on Beethoven’s needed to complete, without any doubt, what is “Heiliger Dankgesang” (Holy song of Bartók’s last fully envisioned work.

COMPOSED MOST RECENT and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four 1945 CSO PERFORMANCES horns, two trumpets, three trombones, July 5, 1986, Ravinia Festival. tuba, timpani, side drum, xylophone, FIRST PERFORMANCE Stephen Hough as soloist, James triangle, tam-tam, bass drum, February 8, 1946; Philadelphia, Levine conducting cymbals, strings Pennsylvania February 21, 22 & 23, 2008, Orchestra APPROXIMATE Hall. Mitsuko Uchida as soloist, Pierre FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME Boulez conducting December 8, 1951, Orchestra Hall. Béla 23 minutes Böszörményi-Nagy as soloist, Rafael February 25, 2008, Carnegie Hall. Kubelík conducting Mitsuko Uchida as soloist, Pierre CSO RECORDINGS Boulez conducting 1965. Peter Serkin as soloist, Seiji July 14, 1960, Ravinia Festival. Leonard Ozawa conducting. RCA Pennario as soloist, Constantin INSTRUMENTATION Silvestri conducting 1990. András Schiff as soloist, Sir Georg solo piano, two flutes and piccolo, two Solti conducting. London (video) oboes and english horn, two clarinets

6 Claude Debussy Born August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France. Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France. Ibéria, Images for Orchestra No. 2

Debussy spent only a In a letter to Durand, his publisher, dated single afternoon in Spain. July 7, 1906, Debussy said that Ibéria would He went to San be finished “next week” and that the other two Sebastián, just over the would follow by the end of the month. But the French border, to catch a next year, when none of them were done, he bullfight, and was back in attempted to explain to Durand why the Images Saint-Jean-de-Luz in were such slow going: “I’m trying to write time for bed. But Debussy ‘something different’—realities, in a manner of was haunted by the spirit speaking—what imbeciles call ‘impressionism,’ of the place—“a country a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, where the roadside stones burn one’s eyes with especially by art critics, who use it as a label to their brilliant light, where the mule drivers sing stick on [J.M.W.] Turner, the finest creator of so passionately from the depths of their hearts,” mystery in the whole of art!” With important, as he later wrote. He loved to play the piano groundbreaking works such as La mer and Pelleas works by Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz and Melisande behind him, and with these Images (who lived in Paris off and on after 1893, and still on the drafting table, Debussy was strug- with whom he became friendly). In 1903, gling to articulate—both to understand and to Debussy wrote his first Spanish piece, Night in define—the continually evolving “newness” of his Granada for piano, which Falla found to be work. He wrote to Durand that same year: “I feel “nothing less than miraculous when one reflects more and more that music, by its very essence, that this music was written by a foreigner guided is not something that can flow inside a rigorous, almost entirely by his visionary genius.” traditional form. It consists of colors and of Debussy’s greatest achievement evoking a rhythmicized time.” Spain he scarcely knew (“truth without authen- ticity,” as Falla put it) is the second of the three béria itself is a triptych, with two richly Images for Orchestra. These national landscapes, detailed and vigorous movements (the first depicting France, Spain, and England, were set against a snappy, virtually ever-present conceived for piano four-hands (or for two pia- rhythm) framing a voluptuously textured noc- nos), and Debussy originally thought of them as turne.I All three are remarkably vivid and sugges- independent works. Ibéria, ultimately published tive, without ever succumbing to tone painting. as the central panel of the travelogue, was the Debussy himself saw a watermelon vendor and first of the pieces to be composed. heard children whistling in the third piece,

COMPOSED MOST RECENT timpani, tambourine, military drum, 1906–1909 CSO PERFORMANCES castanets, xylophone, cymbals, chimes, July 1, 1990, Ravinia Festival. James celesta, two harps, strings FIRST PERFORMANCE Levine conducting (complete Images) February 20, 1910; Paris, France APPROXIMATE April 12 & 13, 2012, Orchestra PERFORMANCE TIME Hall. Charles Dutoit conducting FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES 20 minutes (complete Images) November 10 & 11, 1911, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting CSO RECORDINGS INSTRUMENTATION 1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA July 13, 1943, Ravinia Festival. Pierre three flutes and two piccolos, two Monteux conducting oboes and english horn, three 1967. Jean Martinon conducting. CSO clarinets, three bassoons and (From the Archives, vol. 12: A Tribute to contrabassoon, four horns, three Jean Martinon) (complete Images) trumpets, three trombones, tuba, 7 though he truly grasped its essential quality when he remarked that “it sounds like music that has not been written down—the whole feeling of rising, of people and nature waking.” Maurice Ravel (along with a number of composers including Stravinsky) was present at the premiere of Ibéria in 1910, and he was moved to tears by “this novel, delicate, harmonic beauty, this profound musical sen- sitiveness.” Falla felt that Debussy had perfectly recreated his afternoon in San Sebastián—“the light in the bull-ring, particularly the violent con- trast between the one half of the ring The harbor, San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain, ca. 1898 flooded with sunlight and the other half deep in shade.” But Debussy’s accomplishment, despite the clarity of his with its fluid melodies freely unfolding over a memory and his powers of evocation, lies much languid habanera rhythm. (Pierre Boulez has deeper, in the substance of the music itself. referred to it as a “superior, polished kind of Debussy makes free use of local color, calling improvisation.”) Debussy himself was particu- for tambourine and castanets, and borrowing larly proud of the way he moves from that music the rhythms and melodic ideas of Spanish folk to the third movement, allowing the sounds of music. But his imaginative and thoroughly the day gradually to overtake the night—not the individual treatment of the material recalls what blaring dawn of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung or he himself said of Albéniz: “He does not exactly Strauss’s Zarathustra, but the elusive moment of quote folk tunes, but he is so imbued with them awakening we know from the Turner paintings and has heard so many that they have passed into he so loved. his music and become impossible to distinguish from his own inventions.” The middle movement, suggesting the sensuousness of a southern night, Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago is the most subtly Spanish of the three pieces, Symphony Orchestra.