Ibert Flute Concerto, Op. 37 Tchaikovsk

Program ONe huNDReD TWeNTy-FiRST 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 Friday, September 23, 2011, at 1:30 Tuesday, September 27, 2011, at 7:30 riccardo muti conductor mathieu Dufour flute rota Music from Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) Title Music Journey to Donnafugata Angelica and Tancredi 1 Angelica and Tancredi 2 The Prince’s Dreams Tancredi’s Departure Love and Ambition The Rigged Vote Finale First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Ibert Flute Concerto, Op. 37 Allegro Andante Allegro scherzando Mathieu DufouR IntermIssIon tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in e Minor, Op. 64 Andante—Allegro con anima Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza Waltz: Allegro moderato Finale: Andante maestoso—Allegro vivace This concert series is generously sponsored by Alexandra and John Nichols. 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 nino rota Born December 3, 1911, Milan, Italy. Died April 10, 1979, Rome, Italy. music from Il Gattopardo (the leopard) hen Giuseppe di Lampedusa aristocracy—and in particular Wwas diagnosed with lung of the family of Don Fabrizio cancer in April 1957, he had been Corbera, prince of Salina—during trying to find a publisher for his the Risorgimento as Giuseppe historical novel Il Gattopardo (The Garibaldi, the leader for Italian leopard) for nearly a year. He died unification, and his forces swept in Rome that July—he received a through Sicily. Visconti’s film is rejection letter from Einaudi, one a powerful study in the transfor- of Italy’s leading publishing houses, mation of a people (“If we want only days before—not knowing things to stay the same, everything that The Leopard would eventually will have to change,” the young become the best-selling novel in Tancredi says to his uncle, Don Italian history, achieve iconic status Fabrizio), political upheaval, and in modern Italian literature, and mortality. Rota’s score captures the become an award-winning film volatile mixture of revolution and directed by Luchino Visconti. nostalgia for a dying world that lies The music from the Visconti film at the heart of The Leopard. that opens this concert was written Rota, like all the great film by Nino Rota, no doubt the only composers of his day, was a serious, film composer who could have classically trained musician who done justice to this great Italian wrote substantive music for the epic, set in the 1860s, when the concert hall as well. He already middle classes formed a unified and had composed an opera and a democratic Italy. Lampedusa’s novel ballet before he turned fifteen. He tells the story of the dying Sicilian studied with Alfredo Casella at the ComPoseD InstrumentatIon aPProxImate 1963, for Luchino Visconti’s three flutes and piccolo, two PerformanCe tIme film Il Gattopardo oboes and english horn, 24 minutes These are the first CSO two clarinets and bass performances clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, strings 2 Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in was unique. Visconti’s first idea was Rome, and then came to the U.S. to find a big nineteenth-century in 1930 on a scholarship from the symphony that could be taken apart Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and used throughout the film in bits where he worked with future and pieces in order to have music CSO music director Fritz Reiner. that would match the grandeur, Rota returned to Italy in 1932 and seriousness, and deeply philosophi- earned a degree in literature in cal nature of the novel. He and Milan before he began teaching Rota exhaustively scoured the great music. From 1950 until his death orchestral repertoire, but nothing nearly three decades later, he was satisfied Visconti until Rota sat at director of the conservatory in the piano one day and began to play Bari, where a young Riccardo Muti a portion of a symphony he had became one of his students. written as a young man and put Although Rota composed away long ago, before he had even concertos, ballets, symphonies, orchestrated it. This abandoned theater music, and operas, it is the score became the “symphony” that scores he composed for more than runs throughout Visconti’s film. 150 movies that will long keep his Like Visconti’s sumptuous visual music alive. Rota is best known in style, which uses color and texture the U.S. for his music for Francis to suggest magnificent nineteenth- Ford Coppola’s first two landmark century paintings brought to life, Godfather films in the mid-seventies Rota’s score becomes a grand (Rota won the Academy Award in symphony from an earlier time. 1975 for The Godfather: Part II). Although the studio cast Burt He also scored Franco Zefirelli’s Lancaster as the prince without two Shakespeare films, The Taming consulting Visconti, The Leopard of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet became one of Visconti’s great- in the late sixties. But at the heart est triumphs and won the Palme of Rota’s career are his collabora- d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival tions with two of Italian cinema’s in 1963. Today, The Leopard is greatest directors, Federico Fellini recognized as a landmark—Martin and Luchino Visconti. Rota worked Scorsese recently called it “one of in partnership with Fellini for the greatest visual experiences in three decades, scoring several films cinema”—and it has even achieved that are considered classics today, cult status among designers, who including La strada, La dolce vita, revere its look (“It’s so rich, it’s like 8 ½, and Juliet of the Spirits. a tiramisu,” American decorator Rota first worked with Luchino Charlotte Moss recently told The Visconti in 1954 on Senso, adapting New York Times). Rota’s contribu- music by Anton Bruckner to be tion to the film’s success was widely used on the soundtrack. Although acknowledged at the time, but now, Rota subsequently wrote original played apart from the film and scores for several Visconti films, returned to the concert hall, where their collaboration on Il Gattopardo Rota first envisioned it, the music 3 tinual tension in everything . all these things have formed our character.”). The music that accompanies the journey to the family’s summer house at Donnafugata mirrors the prince’s shifting emotions as he anticipates returning to “his palace, with its many-jetted fountains, its memories of saintly forebears, the sense it gave him of everlasting childhood.” The melody Rota writes for the romance between Tancredi and Angelica—the kind of big theme that is easy to mimic and almost impossible to compose—is a perfect counterpart to their blos- soming passion, which is central to the novel’s narrative. (The entrance of the breathtaking Angelica—a stunning Claudia Cardinale in Visconti’s film—is a game-changing A movie poster for Visconti’s Il Gattopardo moment—“Tancredi could even feel the veins pulsing in his temples,” wrote Lampedusa—and it is reveals unexpected substance and cinematic, even in the novel: “She even symphonic depth. was moving slowly, making her Throughout the film, Rota’s wide white skirt rotate around her, score brilliantly supports Visconti’s and emanating from her whole flair for capturing atmosphere and person was the invincible calm mood, creating a sense of place of a woman sure of her beauty.”) and instantly defining character. Throughout the score, the lyrical The dramatic opening music seems beauty and harmonic richness of inseparable from the parched Rota’s music uncannily mirrors the Sicilian setting itself (“This violence complexity of Visconti’s portrait of a of landscape,” Lampedusa writes, dying world—for as the old order is “this cruelty of climate, this con- overturned, a new Italy is born. 4 Jacques Ibert Born August 15, 1890, Paris, France. Died February 5, 1962, Paris, France. flute Concerto, op. 37 acques Ibert is buried among sometimes unfairly dismissed as Jthe cypress and chestnut trees slight or superficial. in Paris’s Passy Cemetery, in the But Ibert is a true original, and shadow of the Eiffel Tower. His he was a composer of substance grave isn’t far from those of Gabriel from the start. He first attracted Fauré and Claude Debussy. Fate attention in 1922 with his three- hasn’t been particularly kind to movement orchestral piece inspired Ibert, especially outside his native by The Ballad of Reading Gaol, France, and since he died in 1962, Oscar Wilde’s poem about the his music has nearly slipped from execution of a convicted murderer the repertoire. He is revered neither from a nearby cell during his own as a polished master such as Fauré incarceration on morals charges—a nor as a modern visionary like work that’s entirely at odds with Debussy. The fact that he never Ibert’s reputation for light music. belonged to any stylistic “school,” His only string quartet, composed such as the flippant, headline- twenty years later, reflects the tur- grabbing Les six of his friends moil and trauma of World War II. Honegger and Milhaud, has made At first, Ibert hoped to be an it harder to categorize him—and actor, and even after he switched easier to lose sight of him on the to the study of music, his passion congested roadmap of twentieth- for drama gave his own works an century music. As a result, he’s unmistakably theatrical quality. At often thought of as a peripheral the Paris Conservatory, he studied figure, and even his best work is with Émile Pessard, who had ComPoseD fIrst Cso InstrumentatIon 1932–33 PerformanCe solo flute, two flutes, two December 13, 1951, oboes, two clarinets, two fIrst PerformanCe Orchestra hall.

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