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PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTy-ThiRD 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 Thursday, April 24, 2014, at 8:00 Saturday, April 26, 2014, at 8:00 Sir Mark Elder Conductor Richard Goode Piano Ives Symphony No. 2 Andante moderato Allegro Adagio cantabile Lento maestoso— Allegro molto vivace INTERMISSION Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488 Allegro Adagio Allegro assai RICHARD GOODE Strauss Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Op. 28 Saturday’s concert is sponsored by Allstate Insurance Company. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. COMMENTS by Jan Swaff ord Phillip Huscher Charles Ives Born October 20, 1874, Danbury, Connecticut. Died May 19, 1954, New York City. Symphony No. 2 Often in viewing a given around Danbury town common playing diff erent artist, there is a tendency tunes to hear what it sounded like as they neared to assume that they are and passed. Once a Civil War bandmaster, always the same creator: George taught his son that the music of the war Beethoven always was profoundly connected to the hearts and souls Beethoven, Brahms of the people who heard and sung and played always Brahms. Th e it: soldiers singing the sentimental “Tenting reality is that every artist Tonight on the Old Camp Ground” on the night undergoes an evolution, before battle. and often requires a From his father, Charles learned that any journey of years to fi nd a voice with distinctive music, if done earnestly and authentically, was rhymes and reasons. Mahler and Brahms found a refl ection of the deepest feelings, a symbol of their voices fairly early; for Beethoven, it was a the human soul. At the same time, George Ives much longer journey to arrive at the personality told his teenaged son (surely the fi rst time any that fashioned the Eroica. budding composer had been told this) that any Charles Ives’s path to maturity was particularly harmony whatever was acceptable if you knew long and diffi cult, because from early on he was what you were doing with it. Th ese ideas, work- dealing with unprecedented musical ideas and ing on the sensibility of a prodigious born talent, had no guidelines anywhere to help him. Th e goes far to explain how Ives’s music turned out as foundation of his musical experience was equally it did. Added to these experiences was the excit- late-romantic concert music by Brahms, Dvořák, ing new popular style called ragtime, which Ives Tchaikovsky, et al., and, at the same time, the absorbed and eventually integrated into his work. kind of church and community music he grew up Meanwhile, during the 1890s, while Ives was at with as the son of a small-town bandmaster. He Yale, Antonin Dvořák was in America calling for was a prodigy organist who played in churches the country to fi nd its own national voice on the from age fourteen. concert stage; he wrote the New World Symphony At the same time, Charles Ives inherited as an example of how to do it. from his father George an experimental attitude toward the materials of music. George Ives, a ves resonated with all these sometimes con- sort of Yankee tinker in sound, built gadgets to fl icting infl uences, but his integration of them play quarter tones, tried to capture the timbre of in his work did not come easily or quickly. a church bell on piano, and marched two bands IFor years, starting in his teens in the 1880s and COMPOSED MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCE APPROXIMATE 1901–1910, frequently revised July 7, 1984, Ravinia Festival. James PERFORMANCE TIME Levine conducting 37 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE February 22, 1951, New York City INSTRUMENTATION two fl utes and piccolo, two oboes, two FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES clarinets, two bassoons and contrabas- August 8, 1959, Ravinia Festival. Walter soon, four horns, two trumpets, three Hendl conducting trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, bass drum, strings May 21, 22 & 24, 1981, orchestra Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas conducting 2 during his musical studies at Yale, he wrote pieces For Ives, the Second was another brilliant in two streams: smaller works experimenting one-off, a way station after which he moved with radical techniques including polytonality, on. It has a full measure of distinctively Ivesian polyrhythm, dissonant counterpoint, effects of elements, but its tonal and formal world is close space, and the like; and large pieces including the to the conventions of its day. It begins with a First Symphony and First String Quartet—both brooding fugue recalling Bach, and, in its tone, begun at Yale—that were far more conservative perhaps Brahms. An animated middle section and clearly related to the music of their time: again suggests Bachian counterpoint. Before Dvořák , Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and so on. Yet, the final return of the fugue, we get a bit of if the more conservative pieces were eclectic in “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which will style and not particularly prophetic, they were make a memorable appearance in the finale. still marked with Ives’s personality, and all of Already this short movement shows Ives’s them are striking, often delightful, sometimes game in the symphony: the fugue theme is subtly moving works, each with a distinctive voice. based on a bit Ives finally united his experimental and nation- of Stephen alistic side with large pieces that in spirit rose Foster’s song from the great European tradition. They include “Down in de the Fourth Symphony and Concord Sonata. These Cornfield”; and the other works of his maturity starting the animated around 1908 were largely made of portraits of section on the events in home and community: church services, old fiddle tune holidays, parades, parlor music, train journeys, “Pigtown modern urban life, the exaltation of the individ- Fling.” In this ual heart and soul in nature. To that end, much symphony, of their material is American tunes, from gospel Ives is going hymns to marches to Victorian parlor songs to to be con- Civil War melodies. cerned with unifying the he Second Symphony, more or less voice of the Stephen Foster, whose songs were finished in 1902, was an important way American an inspiration for Ives station on Ives’s journey in a direction he people with didT not yet fully understand. At the same time, the European it is one of the most significant landmarks in the tradition, and the prime inspiration of the whole history of American music—a landmark with symphony is the songs of Stephen Foster. a sort of sad asterisk. It is the first symphonic The second movement begins with a jaunty work in history with a manifestly American lilt, the theme recalling the Civil War song voice, prophetic of the “Americana” music Aaron “Wake Nicodemus.” Here, as in most of his Copland and others would be writing twenty-five music, Ives often builds his own “new” themes years later. At the same time, the Second had no on a foundation of old ones, the connections influence at all on the country’s music, because it ranging from clear to subtle. For a whimsical was not heard until Leonard Bernstein pre- touch, the wistfully pretty second theme in this miered it in 1951. When he wrote the Second sonata-form movement is the Dartmouth student Symphony, Ives was an obscure young insurance song “Where, Oh Where, are the Pea-Green clerk and church organist in Manhattan writing Freshmen?” The development section features a a great deal of music that remained unheard warmly beautiful incursion of the hymn “When until the 1920s; the large works emerged only I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and a quite sporadically in the decades after that. The literal eruption of Brahms’s First, like a window climax of the discovery period came in 1965, opened onto the past and quickly shut. Here over a decade after Ives died, with Leopold is another aspect of the Second’s integration Stokowski’s premiere of the Fourth Symphony. of Europe and America: an occasional burst of 3 Brahms, Tchaikovsky, et al., breaking into the The coda, announced by “Reveille” in the American stream. Ives himself later groaned trumpets, is a grand summation of themes over this aspect of the symphony (“it was sort of from the symphony, most of it carried by the a joke, and not a very good one”), but it is still brass. The leading voice is “Columbia, the part of the symphony’s distinctive personality, its Gem of the Ocean” played by trombones as singular integration of old and new. loud as possible. The professionally copied The ABA third movement was written at Yale, final manuscript of the symphony is lost. The originally intended for the First Symphony. Its sketches reveal that Ives was searching for an tone is surging and passionate, high-romantic, ending more appropriate than the traditional and there are some ingenuously earnest perora- final home-key chord or unison. In the 1940s, tions on “America the Beautiful.” The Lento he sketched in the now-famous final chord, maestoso fifth movement is an extended intro- a brassy dissonant yawp. duction to the finale, beginning with the horns Many assume that the final chord is the older recalling the fugue theme of the first movement, Ives giving a raspberry to convention, but he which is contrapuntally spun out before the pointed out that at the end of an evening of return of the “Pigtown Fling” theme.