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Home , Auditorium (composition), Aus Italien, Cello Concerto (Bates), Mason Bates

Program

ONe HuNdRed TWeNTIeTH SeASON Chicago Music director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor emeritus Yo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, May 12, 2011, at 8:00 Friday, May 13, 2011, at 1:30 Saturday, May 14, 2011, at 8:00 riccardo muti Conductor Yo-Yo ma Bates The B-Sides Broom of the System Aerosol Melody (Hanalei) Gemini in the Solar Wind— Temescal Noir— Warehouse Medicine These are the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Schumann Cello in A Minor, Op. 129 Not too fast— Slow— Very lively YO-YO MA IntermISSIon Strauss Aus Italien, Op. 16 In the Country Amid the Ruins of Rome On the Shores of Sorrento Neapolitan Folk Life

These concerts are generously sponsored by Alexandra and John Nichols, Cindy Sargent, and the Zell Family Foundation. Maestro Muti and the musicians of the CSO have graciously contributed their services for Saturday evening’s Pension Benefit Concert. Maestro Muti’s 2011 Spring Residency is supported in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Steinway is the official piano of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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

Born January 23, 1977, , Pennsylvania.

The B-Sides

n March 20, some 1.8 million Mason Bates is already recog- Opeople watched the YouTube nized as one of the signal com- Symphony Orchestra concert that posers of our still young century. featured Mason Bates’s , He first gained the kind of wide the new piece he composed for exposure composers rarely ever that ensemble, which has stretched achieve in April 2009, when the the definition of the orchestra first YouTube Symphony Orchestra, with its novel online audition in its highly publicized Carnegie process and huge laptop follow- Hall debut concert, played the final ing. (Eugene Izotov, the CSO’s section of The B-Sides with Bates principal , traveled to Sydney, performing electronica in the middle Australia, where the 2011 YouTube of the orchestra, as he does in these Symphony project took place, to performances of the complete work be one of the orchestra’s coaches this week in Chicago. Bates prefers and mentors and to perform in the the term electronica (which word- concert.) Since then, an estimated processing programs automatically 30 million viewers have seen the change to electronic) to electronic performance, a number which was music, because, as he says, “the all but unimaginable as recently as, trajectory of almost every classical well, March 20. (It is now the most composer into electronics has been watched lived music concert on the through computer music.” That is Internet, according to YouTube.) not Bates’s story.

ComPoSed InStrumentatIon woodblocks, castanets, 2009 two and piccolo, two , bass drum, and english horn, two glockenspiel, marimba, FIrSt PerFormanCe , e-flat and vibraphone, djembe, large May 20, 2009, , two broom, typewriter, oil These are the first Chicago and , four drum), harp, piano, celesta, Symphony Orchestra horns, three , strings, electronica performances three and , , percussion aPProxImate (suspended and crash PerFormanCe tIme , triangles, sand- 20 minutes paper blocks, ,

2 After a relatively normal musical genre-mixing that they would get upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, both sides of the equation right.” In which included piano lessons Bates’s recent scores, the fusion is and singing in the choir, Bates so natural and the use of electronics studied composition and English so integral and unforced that the literature in the Columbia–Juilliard “electronica” tag seems irrelevant. Exchange program. He worked In works like The B-Sides, Bates with (his Final reveals his love of the grand orches- Alice was a hit of the Solti era in tral tradition of the late nineteenth Chicago) and and early twentieth centuries as (the CSO’s first-ever composer- well as his innate disregard for in-residence), and then moved to stylistic boundaries. “I like mixing the Bay Area in 2001 to enroll in it up,” Bates once said, “But I am a the Ph.D. program at Berkeley’s classical composer—there is a level Center for New Music and Audio of focus at a classical concert that Technologies. His career, like his my music needs.” Last season, when music, is a singular mix of old- the Chicago Symphony played world establishment and New Age Bates’s music for the first time, culture: he has been lavished with the mix was bigger than ever: his big-league honors, from institutions Music from Underground Spaces was such as the American Academy in danced here in Orchestra Hall by Rome and the American Academy Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in for Arts and Letters (an award a work choreographed by Alejandro that “acknowledges the composer Cerrudo as Deep Down Dos. who has arrived at his or her own The idea for The B-Sides voice”), and he has also spent many originated two years ago with the nights as a DJ, spinning and mixing suggestion that Bates write a set at dance clubs in San Francisco, of pieces that focus on texture New York City, Berlin, and Rome. and sonority—something akin Initially, Bates made a name to Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for for himself for the thoughtful Orchestra (which the CSO intro- and engaging ways he merged the duced to the U. S. nearly a century classical and electronic sides of ago). “Since my music had largely his background, beginning with gone in the other direction—large Omnivorous Furniture, premiered works that bathed the listener in at Disney Hall in Los Angeles in immersive experiences—the idea 2004. With that and the works that intrigued me,” Bates recalled. The quickly followed, Bates seemed result was this suite of “off-kilter uniquely equipped to create an symphonic pieces,” as Bates calls organic mix of different kinds of them, that he named The B-Sides. music that had nothing to do with “Like the forgotten bands from the fads or gimmicky cross-culturalism. flipside of an old piece of vinyl, The As composer and critic Kyle Gann B-Sides offers brief landings on a put it, “Eventually, someone was variety of peculiar planets, unified bound to grow up so immersed in by a focus on fluorescent orchestral

3 sonorities and the morphing the vastness and mystery of rhythms of electronica.” Bates space, deliriously unhooking describes the itinerary: from the spacecraft to drift away blissfully. The first stop is the dusky, circuit-board landscape of His final vision of the coast Broom of the System. To the of Northern California drops ticking of a future clock, our us down close to home. The broom—brought to life by initial grit of Temescal Noir, sandpaper blocks and, at one like the Oakland neighbor- point, an actual broom—qui- hood of the title, eventually etly and anonymously keeps shows its subtle charm in hazy, everything running, like a jazz-tinged hues. Unbothered chimney sweep in a huge by electronics, this movement machine. The title is from receives some industrious help a short-story collection by in the rhythm department by David Foster Wallace, though a typewriter and oil drum. At one could place the fairylike its end, the broom returns in broom in Borges’s Anthology of a cameo, again altering the Fantastic Zoology. tempo, and this propels us into Warehouse Medicine. A hom- The ensuing Aerosol Melody age to ’s birthplace—the (Hanalei) blooms on the empty warehouses of Detroit— north shore of Kauai, where the final stop on The B-Sides a gentle, bending melody gives no quarter. Huge brass evaporates at cadence points. swells and out-of-tune pizzicati Djembe and springy pizzicati emulate some of the visceral populate the strange fauna of sonorities of techno, and on this purely acoustic movement, this pounding note The B-Sides inspired by several trips with bows out. the Fleishhacker family. The lazy string glissandi ultimately put the movement, beachside, to sleep.

Gemini in the Solar Wind is a re-imagination of the first A profile of Mason Bates begins on American spacewalk, using page 26. actual communication samples On May 13, at 9:00 p.m. Mason Bates from the 1965 Gemini IV will curate Mercury Soul, an event in partnership with Redmoon Theater that voyage provided by NASA. In is being described as a “cross between this retelling, clips of words, a twenty-first–century salon and a club phrases, and static from the party,” in which live music from CSO original are rearranged to musicians is interspersed with DJ sets show Ed White, seduced by of electronica.

4 robert Schumann Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Saxony, . Died July 29, 1856, Endenich, near Bonn, Germany.

Cello Concerto in a minor, op. 129

ometime in 1832, after injuring and continued to push him to try Shis right hand while practic- different genres and to move in ing the piano with a contraption new directions. designed to strengthen his fingers, On September 1, 1850, Robert, Robert Schumann took up the Clara, and their six children moved cello. It would never become his from Dresden to Düsseldorf, where instrument—even after his hand Robert was to succeed Ferdinand was so crippled that he had to give Hiller as conductor of the local up the piano for good. He never music society. At first, life seemed studied the cello sufficiently to uncommonly pleasant—more perform in public, and he wrote “easygoing” than in Dresden, as very little music for it. But the Clara put it, but this didn’t last. The single he composed members of the Düsseldorf orches- in 1850 is among his finest and tra found Schumann difficult and most idiomatic works. quarrelsome, and he occasionally By 1850, Clara Schumann, a seemed ill-prepared or forgetful on very accomplished pianist, had the podium. Within a few years, become Robert’s right hand in he was asked to resign. In February more than one sense. Now that he 1854, Schumann attempted suicide had been forced to give up per- by throwing himself in the Rhine. forming, she regularly played her Shortly afterwards, he was com- husband’s music in public, cam- mitted to the private asylum in paigned to further his reputation, Endenich, where he died two and a

ComPoSed FIrSt CSo InStrumentatIon October 1850 PerFormanCe solo cello, two flutes, two december 9, 1910, oboes, two clarinets, two FIrSt PerFormanCe Orchestra Hall. Paulo bassoons, two horns, two June 9, 1860, Leipzig, Gruppe, cello, with Frederick trumpets, timpani, strings Germany Stock conducting aPProxImate moSt reCent PerFormanCe tIme CSo PerFormanCe 26 minutes November 2, 2005, Orchestra Hall. Truls Mørk, cello, with Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducting

5 half years later, after being haunted overtures, two cantatas, and several by the voices of angels and visions songs and other small works. of tigers and hyenas. On November 16, 1850, Clara Schumann began this cello mentioned the new concerto in her concerto less than six weeks after diary: “It pleases me very much and he settled in Düsseldorf. It was fin- seems to me to be written in true ished in just fifteen days (seven to violoncello style.” A year after it draft and eight more to orchestrate) was completed, the score still sat on and it opened a new period of fre- Robert’s desk. In October of 1851, netic creative energy. This was not a Clara wrote: spurt of inspiration devoted to one medium, like his celebrated year of I have played Robert’s cello concerto through again, thus giving myself a truly musical and happy hour. The roman- tic quality, the vivacity, the freshness and humor, also the highly interesting interweav- ing of cello and orchestra, are indeed wholly ravishing, and what euphony and deep feeling one finds in all the melodic passages!

Robert canceled plans for a performance in 1852 and apparently shelved the score. But in February 1854, during one of his worst periods of depression, he got out of bed and fussed with this concerto to temporarily silence the “eternal Clara Schumann sound” of the demons and angels he constantly heard. No further plans were made for a performance, song writing in 1840, or the sym- and the concerto wasn’t premiered phonic and chamber music years until four years after the composer’s that immediately followed. But it death, at a concert in Leipzig was the last sustained productive marking the fiftieth anniversary of stretch of his career—during the his birth. rest of 1850 and the beginning In his own catalog, Schumann of the next year he composed his listed this work as a Concert Rhenish Symphony; revised the Piece for cello with orchestral D minor symphony that was later accompaniment. As Clara rightly published as his fourth; and wrote noted, the forces are ingeniously sonatas, a series of tragic interwoven. They are also balanced

6 with uncommon care: the cello part the entire range of the instrument is virtuosic but not exhibitionistic; before pausing for breath. Without interaction with the orchestra ever lightening the virtuoso is intimate and generous, never demands, Schumann proceeds to confrontational. The cadenza in the underplay his soloist’s leading role, third movement is lightly accom- continually drawing the cello into panied, rather than a solo turn in conversation with the instruments the spotlight. The three movements of the orchestra. In the slow middle are closely related and carefully movement, he even engages the dovetailed, so that they are played soloist in a duet with the orchestra’s without pause. The opening chords principal cello, underlining the of the concerto return to haunt the concept of musical community. This slow movement, and the cello’s first is a concerto that explores common theme becomes a recitative linking ground and collaboration rather that movement and the finale. than contrast and drama, and, as The cello establishes a voice of such, it is highly unusual and highly authority with its opening line, a successful. In spirit, if not in actual rich and lyrical run-on sentence that sonority, it comes daringly close to spans thirty measures and almost the heart of chamber music.

Symphony Center Information

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note: Fire exits are located on all levels and are for emergency use only. The lighted exit sign nearest your seat is the shortest route outdoors. Please walk—do not run—to your exit and do not use elevators for emergency exit. Volunteer ushers provided by The Saints—Volunteers for the Performing Arts (www.saintschicago.org)

7 Born June 11, 1864, , Germany. Died September 8, 1949, Garmisch, Germany.

Aus Italien, op. 16

will never be converted to Italian had been wrong about Italian music Imusic,” Richard Strauss wrote all along.) to his father, Munich’s most Strauss had long wanted to visit celebrated horn player, during his Italy, but it was first trip to Italy in the summer of who finally urged him to go, saying 1886. But Aus Italien, the large- it would do him more good than scale symphonic work he began he could imagine. Music’s elder sketching as soon as he arrived, is, statesman and a man of great in fact, a love poem to Italy in all influence on Strauss, both musi- its splendor—its ancient ruins, the cally and personally at this point, bucolic countryside, the glory of Brahms had made his first trip to its paintings and sculpture, and, Italy a decade earlier and had fallen yes, its music. (Strauss’s conversion completely under its spell. “One began mid-journey when he heard travels through the whole of Italy as Verdi’s Requiem, then just a dozen though it were a most beautiful gar- years old, and found it “pretty den,” he wrote to Clara Schumann, and original”; when he conducted “and to my mind it often rises Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera in to the heights of a paradise.” Munich immediately after he Although Strauss lost his suitcase returned home to start a new job at in Naples and his laundry in Rome, the Court , he admitted he and groused that shopkeepers

ComPoSed FIrSt ravInIa FeStIval contrabassoon, four horns, 1886 PerFormanCe two trumpets, three trom- July 27, 1973. Riccardo bones, timpani, cymbals, FIrSt PerFormanCe Muti conducting triangle, tambourine, snare March 2, 1887, drum, harp, strings Munich, Germany. The moSt reCent composer conducting CSo PerFormanCe CSo reCordIng November 30, 1985, 1941 (On the Shores of FIrSt CSo Orchestra Hall. erich Sorrento only). Frederick PerFormanCe Leinsdorf conducting Stock conducting. RCA december 29, 1899, InStrumentatIon aPProxImate Theatre. Theodore two flutes and piccolo, two PerFormanCe tIme Thomas conducting oboes and english horn, two 47 minutes clarinets, two bassoons and

8 overcharged him everywhere, he first horn concerto, a Burlesque for too was clearly intoxicated by the piano and orchestra, the F minor land, the people, and the culture. symphony—and the landmark tone Like Berlioz and Mendelssohn, poems that immediately followed— who both made life-altering trips beginning with and Death to Italy in the 1830s, Strauss began and Transfiguration—that would to sketch musical ideas almost as make him almost unimaginably soon as he arrived; Aus Italien, famous. Strauss himself called Aus the work he ultimately fashioned Italien a “symphonic fantasy,” sug- from his musical snapshots, is, gesting its hybrid status between along with Berlioz’s Harold in a four-movement symphony with Italy and Mendelssohn’s Italian pictorial qualities—a descendant of Symphony, one of the great musical Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony travelogues. (And, like Berlioz and of a half century earlier—and Mendelssohn, Strauss packed his the rich programmatic works by sketches and returned home before Liszt. Composed just one year he set to work transforming them after Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, into a finished piece of music.) Strauss’s new score opens the By Strauss’s own yardstick, Aus window wide on a different kind Italien was his earliest significant of orchestral landscape altogether. work. “This is the first work of (There is no escaping a new influ- mine to have met with opposition ence on Strauss, as well: his way from the mob so it must be of some home from Italy, Strauss stopped importance,” he wrote after the over in Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s premiere in Munich on March 2, Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal.) 1887 (less than a month after the Funded entirely by his wealthy premiere of Verdi’s Otello in Milan). father and his even wealthier uncle, He said that he was “immensely Georg Pschorr—the Pschorr brew- proud” of the controversy it stirred: ery fuels Munich’s Oktoberfest to “Some people applauded lustily, this day—Strauss’s Italian journey others hissed loudly, but finally took him to Verona, Bologna, the applause won the day.” He still Rome, Naples, Sorrento, Salerno, clearly took pleasure in calling the Capri, and Florence. In Bologna, piece a “symphonic fantasy embel- Raphael’s celebrated painting of lished by local opposition” when he Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of asked the eminent conductor Hans music, moved Strauss to tears. (Just von Bülow if he could dedicate the six years earlier, the English poet score to him. Percy Shelley wrote, after viewing Strauss himself described Aus the painting, that Saint Cecilia Italien as “the connecting link “seems rapt in such inspiration as between the old and the new produced her image in the painter’s methods” of composition. It is, in mind. . . . She is listening to the other words, the transition between music of heaven.”) Strauss himself those early orchestral pieces of his began to hear snatches of music as that we rarely hear today—the he traveled, and he not only began

9 writing them down—obviously trust that the music could speak already knowing that a big orches- for itself. The first movement, tral piece marked Andante and titled In the would be his Country, suggests the magical most impor- effect of the Roman countryside tant souve- “bathed in sunlight as seen from nir of the the Villa d’Este at Tivoli.” This trip—but he expansive and atmospheric music, made notes of which Strauss called a prelude, tonalities that comes the closest to the model corresponded of the by Liszt, to each of another influential composer who the sights he found musical inspiration in his visited. He Italian travels. The second move- later told von ment, inspired by standing amid Bülow that the Roman ruins, conveys “fantastic Conductor Hans von Bülow he had “never images of vanished glory, feelings really believed of melancholy and grief amid the in inspiration brilliant sunshine of the present.” through the beauty of nature, but in Strauss said it resembled a “great the Roman ruins I learned better, symphonic first movement,” and for ideas just came flying to me.” the shadow of Brahms lingers over All the characteristics of the much of this music, even though soon-to-be-famous Strauss are Strauss, finally finding his own already present in Aus Italien, voice, knew that Brahms was the except perhaps for economy (and past. On the Shores of Sorrento, that would never become Strauss’s Strauss’s third movement, is his strong suit). On page after page first effort at serious musical picto- of Aus Italien we find the bold rialism—the rustling of the wind, orchestral swagger of Don Juan, birdsong, “the distant murmur or the broad lyric outpouring of of the sea”—and with these few Death and Transfiguration, the bril- exquisitely scored pages he suggests liantly descriptive writing of Till that this will prove to be one of his Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks—works greatest talents. The finale is based that were all written within the on “a well-known Neopolitan folk next decade. Strauss still owes a song” and, at the end, “a tarantella great deal to Brahms’s orchestral which the composer heard in music, but as he pointed out, with Sorrento.” The first tune, so ubiq- Aus Italien he was taking “a first uitous and natural sounding that step toward independence” as a Strauss mistook it for folk song, is, tone poet. in fact, the ever-popular “Funiculì, funiculà” composed by Luigi us Italien was the only work Danza in 1880 to celebrate the Afor which Strauss published a new funicular on Mount Vesuvius, specific program, later learning to which put on a spectacular show

10 the day Strauss visited. The entire 1888, just a year after the Munich movement—“a hilarious jumble of premiere. Once Thomas came to themes,” as Strauss admitted—is Chicago three years later to launch colored by fireworks of its own, and the Chicago Orchestra, he began was meant to depict “the colorful to champion Strauss’s music here. bustle of Naples.” The tarantella He programmed - during the eventually sweeps the finale to its Orchestra’s ninth season, and then conclusion, though not without a played it just twice more—in 1905 fond glance back at the glorious and 1908—before it disappeared Italian countryside. from the Orchestra’s repertoire— Although Aus Italien is regularly while Don Juan, for example, con- overlooked today, it was this work tinued to be performed here nearly that announced Strauss as the every season up through the 1950s. leading musical revolutionary of the (The third movement of Aus Italien, day and introduced him to many On the Shores of Sorrento, was a concertgoers. (Aus Italien was his favorite of the Stock era and often first orchestral piece performed in appeared on evenings of lighter England, for example.) Theodore music.) When Riccardo Muti Thomas, who had given the U.S. conducted Aus Italien at the Ravinia premiere of Strauss’s F minor Festival in 1973, the Orchestra had symphony in New York in 1884— not played the complete score in at a time when Strauss’s music was sixty-five years. almost completely unknown in America—wrote to Strauss to ask if he could introduce Aus Italien to this country. That performance, with Thomas’s own orchestra, took Phillip Huscher is the program annota- place in Philadelphia, on March 8, tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Symphony Orchestra © 2011 Chicago

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