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Home , Francis Poulenc, Prelude and fugue

Please note that due to health-related reasons, harpsichordist Kristian Bezuidenhout has withdrawn from these concerts. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra welcomes Mahan Esfahani, who has graciously agreed to perform. The program remains the same.

PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, April 30, 2015, at 8:00 Friday, May 1, 2015, at 8:00 Saturday, May 2, 2015, at 8:00 Harry Bicket Conductor Mahan Esfahani Rameau Dance Suite from Platée Orage (Storm) Air, pour des fous gais—Air, pour des fous tristes First Menuet—Second Menuet Air Pantomime (Fièrement)—First Rigaudon—Second Rigaudon First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Poulenc Concert champêtre for Harpsichord and Orchestra Adagio—Allegro molto Andante Finale: Presto MAHAN ESFAHANI INTERMISSION Bach, arr. Stravinsky Four and from The Well-Tempered Clavier Prelude and No. 10 in E Minor from Book 1 Prelude and Fugue No. 4 in C-sharp Minor from Book 1 Prelude and Fugue No. 11 in F Major from Book 2 Prelude and Fugue No. 24 in B Minor from Book 1 First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Bach Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major, BWV 1068 Overture Air Gavottes 1 and 2 Bourrée Gigue

The appearance of Mahan Esfahani is made possible in part by the John Ward Seabury Distinguished Soloist Fund. 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

Jean-Philippe Rameau Born before September 25, 1683, Dijon, . Died September 12, 1764, Paris, France. Dance Suite from Platée

Jean-Philippe Rameau is most widely studied textbooks in the history one of the orchestral of music. world’s neglected masters. Like Bruckner, another composer whose career Although he is regularly began in the church, Rameau was a late bloomer. acknowledged as one of His success as a composer dates from 1733, when the most important and Hippolyte et Aricie, his first major stage work, influential composers of was given a triumphant reception at its Paris the French baroque, Opéra premiere only six days after the composer’s modern symphony fiftieth birthday. (It was not without its critics, orchestras today rarely who found his style an affront to the tradition play his music. When the Chicago Symphony established by Lully in the late seventeenth cen- performed Rameau’s music for the first time in tury, and the score became the first musical work 1900, the program book painted him as a worthy to be called “baroque” in the critical sense of the companion to Bach, pointing out that when he word.) Hippolyte et Aricie changed the direction of died “all France mourned for him; Paris gave him Rameau’s career, and, over the next thirty years, a magnificent funeral, and in many other towns he turned out another two dozen works for the funeral services were held in his honor.” The stage, representing the many kinds of French Orchestra played selections from his Castor dramatic music of the day—a number of hybrid et Pollux the next season, but Rameau’s music was forms that combine elements of opera and ballet. rarely performed again after that. (From 1963 to 2006, his name did not appear on Chicago he late 1740s were the most productive Symphony subscription programs once.) time of Rameau’s career, and between 1745 and 1749 alone he composed nine contemporary of Bach, Handel, and stageT works. Platée was written, largely in 1745, Vivaldi, Rameau was the greatest for the dauphin’s wedding festivities, which French composer of the eighteenth cen- took place at Versailles that March. The theme, turyA and one of the giants of the Enlightenment. regarding a mock marriage between Jupiter and Like Bach, he was trained as a church organist an ugly nymph, Platée (played by a male singer), and choirmaster. After working in the cathe- seems oddly ill-suited to the occasion, particu- drals in Avignon, Clermont-Ferrand, Dijon larly since the bride, the Spanish princess Maria (he succeeded his father in the post there), and Teresa, was herself famously unattractive. But Lyons, he settled in Paris in 1722. That year, his apparently Rameau’s delightful music and the treatise on music theory, the Traité de l’harmonie, riotously comic nature of the plot—highly unex- was published, and it proved to be one of the pected in at the time—charmed

COMPOSED PREVIOUS CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1745, revised 1748–49 January 16 & 17, 1931, Orchestra Hall. two , two bassoons, harpsi- Eric DeLamarter conducting Felix chord, strings FIRST PERFORMANCE Mottl’s arrangement of the Menuet March 31, 1745; Versailles, France APPROXIMATE There are the Chicago Symphony PERFORMANCE TIME Orchestra’s first performances of 15 minutes Nicholas McGegan’s arrangement of the Dance Suite from Platée.

2 both the assembled crowd and the happy couple. orchestral storm (Orage), already raging in the Following that single performance, Platée was very first measure and driving forward in a not performed again until it was given at the steady stream of sixteenth notes to its conclusion. Paris Opéra four years later, with a revised (Rameau’s mastery of special effects, particularly libretto. It quickly became one of Rameau’s in the weather department, is comparable to that greatest successes. of his one-time colleague Vivaldi.) The storm Dance music lies at the heart of all Rameau’s gives way to two genteel dances, the airs for stage works and is effortlessly integrated into the the happy and sad lunatics. (According to the action, not isolated as a special attraction, as in libretto, the happy characters were costumed as later opera. The selection of dances from Platée babies and the sad ones as Greek philosophers.) that Harry Bicket conducts this week includes A pair of minuets (one in the major mode, the numbers drawn from the prologue as well as other in minor), and an animated pantomime the first two of three acts. Rameau’s knack for number follow. Two lively rigaudons (based on a writing lively, rhythmical music that naturally folk dance for couples, said to have been created invites dance is readily apparent, as is his gift by the Marseille dance master Rigaud in 1485) for generous melody. The suite opens with an conclude the suite on a note of good cheer.

3 Francis Poulenc Born January 7, 1899, Paris, France. Died January 30, 1963, Paris, France. Concert champêtre for Harpsichord and Orchestra

Wanda Landowska, who scandalous premiere of in 1913 introduced the harpsi- (he was just fourteen at the time), but he caught chord to the concert stage up with it the following year and was intoxicated at the beginning of the by Stravinsky’s music. In 1917, he attended the twentieth century, historic opening of Satie’s Parade, with sets and appeared with the costumes by Picasso, and quickly fell under Chicago Symphony on Satie’s spell—Poulenc’s op. 1, a Rapsodie nègre, March 14, 1924. In a unveiled that same year, is dedicated to Satie. In program designed to show 1920, Poulenc and five of his composer friends off the still-unfamiliar were dubbed , earning him a handy instrument, she played a by Handel and label in all the music history books, but also solo works by Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel on the unfairly branding him forever as a frivolous, harpsichord (and, to demonstrate her versatility, cheeky sophisticate inspired by the antics of Mozart’s E-flat major on the . piano). Just the previous year, Landowska had been introduced to Francis Poulenc in Paris at the n June of 1923, Poulenc sat in the music home of , heir to the sewing room of the Princess de Polignac’s Paris machine fortune. Better known by her fancy estate, along with Picasso, Stravinsky, and married name, the Princess Edmond de Polignac Ithe poet Paul Valery, for the first staged per- hosted one of Paris’s most celebrated salons, formance of Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show, where many of the early twentieth century’s a puppet opera with a prominent harpsichord artistic giants regularly gathered. part—introducing him both to the exotic sounds of the antiquated instrument and to the magnetic oulenc was no stranger to Parisian high performing style of Landowska. (This was such society. He was born into a wealthy a star-studded event that no less an artist than family and grew up in the city center, Viñes was enlisted as a stagehand.) Pnear the Élysée Palace. His father ran the huge Rhône-Poulenc pharmaceutical firm (his family hroughout her career, Landowska name was as well known as Singer’s in business was largely known as an early music circles), and his mother came from a long line of specialist—in 1959, her New York Times native Parisians. He started studying the piano obituaryT concluded that “In a world where with his mother at the age of five, and later took everyone was looking to the future, Wanda lessons from Ricardo Viñes, the great pianist and Landowska found her element three centuries friend of Debussy and Ravel. He soon began to backward in time.” But she was in fact very meet the artistic celebrities of the day, including much attuned to the latest developments in the Satie, Cocteau, and Stravinsky. He missed the music world, and following the Falla premiere

COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES two clarinets, two bassoons, four 1927–September 1928 June 5 & 6, 1975, Orchestra Hall. horns, two trumpets, trombone, tuba, Igor Kipnis as soloist, Henry timpani, percussion, strings FIRST PERFORMANCE Mazer conducting May 3, 1929; Paris, France APPROXIMATE INSTRUMENTATION PERFORMANCE TIME solo harpsichord, two flutes and two 25 minutes piccolos, two oboes and english horn,

4 in the princess’s home, she asked both Falla today it has all but disappeared from concert and Poulenc to write for her to play. programs.) Landowska also nagged him, in her (In time, she also commissioned works from persistent yet charming way, to finish the piece. Stravinsky, Fauré, Ravel, and Debussy, who In the process, they became the best of friends. called her Madame Machine à courdre [Madame (Years later, Poulenc would delight party guests Sewing Machine].) with his Landowska imitations, sometimes Poulenc did not begin composition at once, complete with wig and somber attire, right down perhaps uncertain how to incorporate a sound to the sensible shoes.) he associated with the music of earlier centuries into his own sparkling modernist language. He oulenc writes three movements, in the first studied the recordings Landowska made conventional fast-slow-fast pattern. He in 1923 and 1926 of music by Bach, Rameau, begins with a stately, baroque introduction Handel, and Mozart. But it was not until he Pto raise the curtain on his view of a concerto that visited Landowska at her country home in is at once a modern concoction and a homage Saint-Leu-la-Forêt later in 1926 that he began to the French harpsichord tradition of Rameau to imagine how to write a concerto for this novel and friends. Despite his early enthusiasm for instrument, of which his hostess was the greatest the radical, rebellious composers of Paris—and champion. Throughout his stay, Landowska even though he went to Vienna in 1921 to meet played music for Poulenc—to stir his imagi- Schoenberg—Poulenc himself was essentially a nation, acquaint him with the harpsichord’s traditionalist, although one with wit and a healthy technical possibilities, and introduce him to streak of irreverence. “I am not the kind of the pre-Revolutionary French rage for music musician who makes harmonic innovations, like designed for elaborate outdoor entertainments— Igor, Ravel, or Debussy,” he later said, insisting the so-called fête champêtre. (Jean-Antoine that “there is a place for new music that is content Watteau’s Fête champêtre, in the collection of with using other people’s chords.” That is the the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the most essence of Poulenc’s own brand of neoclassicism. famous paintings on the subject.) In Landowska’s (Stravinsky’s , the defining neoclassical lovely rural setting, the idea of writing rustic, score of the era, premiered in Paris in 1920.) pastoral music was apparently intoxicating even Each movement proceeds, in fits and starts, to such a devoted urbanite as Poulenc (he had with a profusion of musical ideas, sometimes barely ventured beyond the Paris suburbs before stumbling over each other to be heard. The archi- the age of eighteen), and so he began his own tecture is quirky, disjointed, and modern, but Concert champêtre at once—a country concerto the material itself evokes an age long gone. The from the point of view of a true Parisian. spirit of the baroque sicilienne, a slow dance in After returning to Paris, Poulenc often 6/8, hovers over the middle movement; the finale consulted with Landowska as he worked—this is a kind of gigue. Poulenc’s signature style is, in was not only Poulenc’s first concerto, but his fact, a captivating kind of pastiche, full of genial first major orchestral score as well—and she harmonies, impertinent gestures, and big tunes. insisted that he visit her regularly to go through “I’ve often been reproached about my ‘street the score, sometimes nearly note by note, talking music’ side,” he once admitted. “It’s genuineness through details or adjusting the instrumentation has been suspected, and yet there’s nothing more in order preserve the delicate balance between genuine in me.” In fact, the way Poulenc marries a modern orchestra and the eighteenth-century serious musical ideals with the wit and style of harpsichord. In the final score, the harpsichord Parisian café society is the essence of his unique rarely plays with the full ensemble, but with language. The trumpet calls in the finale—the varying chamber-music combinations. (Poulenc concerto’s most obvious gesture to a pastoral eventually made a piano version of the concerto, tradition—are nothing more than memories of perhaps fearing that the harpsichord would never the bugle calls he heard as a boy in the woods catch on as a concert instrument. He performed surrounding the Fort Neuf de Vincennes, a quick the piano version regularly for many years, but taxi ride from the center of Paris.

5 , arr. Stravinsky Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany. Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany. Four Preludes and Fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier

In 1955, J.M. Coetzee, and Beethoven eventually arranged several of the who would later win the fugues for string ensemble as a way of giving this Nobel Prize for literature, extraordinary music wider exposure. was a bored fifteen-year- The entire generation of composers born around old living in the suburbs 1810—Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and of Cape Town, South Liszt, just to mention the headliners—came to Africa. One Sunday think of Bach as essential to their art, if not as the afternoon, he heard music foundation of music itself, and they considered that he had never heard The Well-Tempered Clavier as both the first of before coming from the music’s “great books” and the bedrock of their house next door, where transient students lived. keyboard technique. Bach’s collection remained a “As long as the music lasted, I was frozen,” he touchstone for the most adventurous composers of later wrote. “I dared not breathe. I was being the twentieth century as well. played spoken to by the music as music had never one of the fugues every morning before breakfast, spoken to me before.” Much later, Coetzee to start the day fresh. , who learned that it was Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier made a full orchestral transcription of Bach’s that he heard—at the time he knew it only “in a E-flat major prelude and fugue (Saint Anne), somewhat suspicious and even hostile teenage liked to call Bach “the first composer with twelve manner—as ‘’.” But he realized tones,” thinking of the B minor fugue from that afternoon—the afternoon when “everything book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, in which all changed”—that he had discovered something he twelve steps of the chromatic scale appear in the would one day identify not as “classical music,” opening subject. but as a “classic”—one of our civilization’s defining works of art. he Well-Tempered Clavier was ’s daily fare at the end of ach was the first great composer to be his life—he loved to begin the day by forgotten by the general public and playing a page or two as a way of exercising his then to reemerge to take his place as Tfingers and jump-starting his thoughts. Robert Bone of the masters. Even so, The Well-Tempered Craft, Stravinsky’s long-time colleague and Clavier, his encyclopedic two-volume keyboard amanuensis, said that after the composer died, he collection, never went unplayed. Within thirty found the music of Bach’s E-flat minor prelude years of Bach’s death, Mozart was busy study- still open on the piano. It was the last piece ing The Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven Stravinsky had played, just days earlier. was learning to play the piano by practicing its Stravinsky’s final project—in a career twenty-four preludes and fugues. Both Mozart that stretched over seventy years—was an

COMPOSED PREVIOUS CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1722 (publication of volume 1), April 14 & 15, 1938, Orchestra Hall. three clarinets and bass clarinet, two ca. 1740 (volume 2) Frederick Stock conducting his own bassoons, strings arrangement of Prelude no. 4 in April–June, 1969, C-sharp minor APPROXIMATE Stravinsky arrangement PERFORMANCE TIME These are the first Chicago Symphony 25 minutes Orchestra performances of Stravinsky’s arrangement of Bach’s preludes and fugues.

6 of four of Bach’s preludes and than the keyboard.” Stravinsky originally fugues. He began work in April 1969, a year signed a contract with his publisher, Boosey largely given over to serious illness and to treat- & Hawkes, to orchestrate two preludes and ments in New York and Los Angeles. His wife fugues, and then later decided to add two more. Vera’s diary suggests how difficult it must have (The pencil manuscripts were never delivered; been for Stravinsky to compose—her entries for they now reside in the Paul Sacher Collection April and May alternate progress reports on the in Basel, Switzerland.) Stravinsky picked three Bach project (April 27: “Prelude XXIV com- prelude-and-fugue pairs from Bach’s first pleted”; May 27: “Fugue XXIV completed”) with set of twenty-four (including Schoenberg’s medical updates (April 22: “very disagreeable “twelve-tone” favorite, in B minor), and one from night nurse $60 a night!”; May 15: “Igor so weak, volume 2. His original plan was to set the pre- so thin”). There is only the occasional reference ludes for strings and the fugues for solo winds, to something outside the worlds of music and but he broke the pattern when he realized that medicine (April 29: “Dinner: caviar tequila”). the B minor fugue was better suited to strings. Photographs taken by Dominique Nabokov in The composer who once made history completely the Pierre Hotel on May 1 show Stravinsky look- redecorating Pergolesi’s music in Pulcinella is ing all-business, with the draft of the B minor remarkably faithful to the Bach scores he loved. fugue orchestration on his desk. Stravinsky completed the Bach project that June. “My tran- hese final pages from the great twentieth- scriptions from The Well-Tempered Clavier were century master were unknown for many finished in the hospital,” he later told Craft, “and years after Stravinsky’s death. They were the next day, my birthday, as it happened, I was notT discussed in the Stravinsky literature, and paroled back to the hotel.” remained unpublished until 2012. More than Stravinsky’s objective, like that of Mozart just the last thoughts of a dying man, they are a and Beethoven before him, was “to make the testament to the enduring quality of music and music available in an instrumental form other the nourishing spirit of the creative act.

7 J. S. Bach Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major, BWV 1068

When the young 1802. And so when Mendelssohn tried to inter- Mendelssohn played the est Goethe in the magnificent unfolding of the first movement of Bach’s opening of Bach’s third suite, this was recently Third Orchestral Suite on discovered music, unknown to all but the most the piano for Goethe, the serious musicians. poet said he could see “a The numbering of Bach’s four suites, like that procession of elegantly of Dvořák’s symphonies, is a convention that dressed people proceeding has little to do with their order of composition. down a great staircase.” The first suite is, apparently, the earliest, dating Bach’s music was nearly from before 1725, but the second is the last and forgotten in 1830, and Goethe, never having the fourth suite was probably written around the heard this suite before, can be forgiven for time of the first. The third suite can be dated, wanting to attach a visual image to such stately with some certainty, from 1731. None of Bach’s and sweeping music. original manuscripts for the suites has survived, Today it’s hard to imagine a time when Bach’s which makes dating them unusually difficult. But name meant little to music lovers and when for the third suite we have a set of parts written these four orchestral suites weren’t considered in three hands: by Bach himself (the last two landmarks. But in the years immediately fol- movements of the first violin and continuo parts); lowing Bach’s death in 1750, public knowledge by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who served of his music was nil, even though other, more as his father’s copyist beginning in 1729; and by cosmopolitan composers, such as Handel, who Johann Ludwig Krebs, who often worked for the died only nine years later, remained popular. It’s composer around 1730. (The collaborative nature Mendelssohn who gets the credit for the redis- of the writing out of the parts suggests that Bach covery of Bach’s music, launched in 1829 by his was unusually pressed for time.) And we know revival of the Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin. that this suite was written for performance by A very large portion of Bach’s orchestral the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig, which Bach music is lost; the existing twenty-some solo took over in 1729, for concerts given at Gottfried concertos, six Brandenburg Concertos, and Zimmermann’s coffeehouse every Friday night four orchestral suites no doubt represent just from 8 to 10. the tip of the iceberg. We’re probably lucky to Bach didn’t call these works suites—he used have these four suites at all, in fact, since they the conventional term of the day, overture, aren’t mentioned—even in passing—either in after their grand opening movements. But they the extensive obituary prepared by Carl Philipp are unmistakably suites—that is to say, sets of Emanuel Bach, the composer’s son, or in varied popular dances. For the idea of starting J. N. Forkel’s pioneering biography published in each one off with a large-scale overture, Bach

COMPOSED June 29, 1941, Ravinia Festival. INSTRUMENTATION ca. 1731 Frederick Stock conducting (Air and two oboes, three trumpets, timpani, Gavotte only) strings, continuo FIRST PERFORMANCE August 5, 1948, Ravinia Festival. Pierre date unknown APPROXIMATE Monteux conducting PERFORMANCE TIME FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES 21 minutes MOST RECENT October 23 & 24, 1891, CSO PERFORMANCES Auditorium Theatre. Theodore August 28, 2000, Ravinia Festival. Thomas conducting Vladimir Feltsman conducting April 3, 4 & 5, 2009, Orchestra Hall. Pinchas Zukerman conducting 8 was indebted to of the suites includes a different, hand-picked Jean-Baptiste selection.) The third suite includes the gavotte, Lully, the a gracious dance in duple meter that, despite its seventeenth-century origins as a French peasant dance, was regu- French composer larly performed in court circles in the sixteenth who perfected what century; the bourrée, a lively French folk dance we now call the in duple meter that was often danced at the court French overture: of Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715; a solemn, striding and the gigue, a fast dance that originated in introduction kept Ireland and England, where it was known as the in motion by the jig (Shakespeare calls it “hot and hasty”). Bach’s son Carl brittle snap of dotted No single movement is as famous as the Philipp Emanuel rhythms, followed by Italianate aria of the third suite. This is one of a quick, lively, imi- Bach’s most magnificent creations, the limpid tative main section. beauty of its melody overshadowing an accom- Bach borrows Lully’s boilerplate but makes his paniment of unusual contrapuntal richness. (The overtures into magnificent, expansive pieces that familiar title, Air on the G String, refers not to tower over the dances that follow. (In fact, Bach’s Bach’s original, but to an arrangement for solo overtures are nearly as long as the remainder of violin made by August Wilhelmj in 1871 that the suites they introduce.) Mendelssohn picked transposed the melody more than an octave wisely when he played one of these overtures lower so that it could be played on the violin’s for Goethe, for they are among the most lowest string, the one tuned to G.) Perhaps impressive and exciting of Bach’s instrumental Mendelssohn miscalculated in not picking this pieces—and he knew from previous experience movement to play for Goethe, for it has rarely that Goethe didn’t easily fall under music’s spell. failed to move listeners since. (Mendelssohn finally admitted, to his surprise and frustration, that the great poet wasn’t partic- ularly sophisticated in his musical tastes.) For the remaining movements, Bach used Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago many of the most popular forms of his day. (Each Symphony Orchestra.

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