The Chicago Symphony Orchestra welcomes Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who has graciously agreed to conduct these concerts while CSO Music Director Riccardo Muti recovers from a hip operation. Please note that Ligeti’s Ramifications has been replaced by Sibelius’s Rakastava.

PROGRAM

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

Thursday, February 11, 2016, at 8:00 Friday, February 12, 2016, at 8:00 Saturday, February 13, 2016, at 8:00

Gennady Rozhdestvensky Conductor Stephen Williamson Clarinet Sibelius Rakastava, Op. 14 The Lover The Path of the Beloved Good Evening—Farewell Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 Allegro Adagio Rondo: Allegro STEPHEN WILLIAMSON

INTERMISSION

Pärt Orient & Occident First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48 Piece in the Form of a Sonatina: Andante non troppo—Allegro moderato Waltz: Moderato, tempo di valse Elegy: Larghetto elegiaco Finale: Russian Theme. Andante—Allegro con spirito

This concert series is made possible by the Juli Grainger Endowment. 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 Sibelius Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland. Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland. Rakastava, Op. 14

When Sibelius was just that his music was difficult to perform and seven years old, his family too “modern.” made the forward-looking decision to transfer him ibelius knew that Rakastava was filled with from a popular Swedish strong and distinctive musical ideas, and language preparatory he refused to give up on it. In 1894, the school to the brand new, Syear after the competition, he arranged the work first-ever Finnish lan- for male chorus and string orchestra, and then guage grammar school. four years later he rewrote it again, this time There, he came into for mixed chorus. But it was only when he put contact for the first time with the Finnish folk the score aside, gave it a rest, and returned to it poetry collections—the Kalevala and the one last time in 1911, that the real brilliance of Kanteletar—finding the source for much of the Rakastava emerged at last. By 1911, Sibelius was music that would one day make him famous. a different composer from the one who had found Although he didn’t truly master Finnish until he inspiration in the Kanteletar texts eighteen years was in his twenties, this exposure to the sounds before. Now, internationally famous for Finlandia and rhythms of the language fired his imagina- and the composer of four increasingly visionary tion at an early age and sparked his ongoing symphonies, Sibelius completely rethought project of reading and re-reading these poetry Rakastava. Having uncovered the expressive collections that had been compiled by potential of purely orchestral music, Sibelius Elias Lönnrott in the first half of the now made the radical move of recomposing nineteenth century. Rakastava for instruments alone, the titles of his Sibelius’s first major composition was the three movements the only remaining evidence expansive Kullervo symphony that was based of the original Kanteletar texts. Removing the on the Kalevala, and it was such a success in Finnish words he so loved liberated Sibelius. The 1892 that from that point on Finland looked fourth and final version of Rakastava, in which no further for its greatest composer. In 1893, the rhythm and nuance of the text have been Sibelius began his first opera, The Building of completely internalized, is the one that brought the Boat, also inspired by the Kalevala. That him closest to the emotional content of the same year he set three lyrical love poems Kanteletar poems. Scored for strings and minimal from the Kanteletar for unaccompanied men’s percussion (timpani, sparsely and quietly used chorus, titling the set Rakastava (The lover). in the outer movements, with six soft notes for When he entered Rakastava in a competition the triangle in the central movement), Rakastava sponsored by the Helsinki University Chorus, is a miniature triptych, with the final panel he was told, not for the last time in his career, recalling the unsung narrative of the first.

COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1893–1911 May 14, 15 & 16, 2009, Orchestra Hall. string orchestra, triangle, timpani Osmo Vänskä conducting FIRST PERFORMANCE APPROXIMATE Date unknown PERFORMANCE TIME 11 minutes

2 Wolfgang Mozart Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria. Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria. Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622

This concerto is the last secret bloodsuckers, and worthless persons who important work Mozart served only to amuse him at the table and inter- finished before his death. course with whom injured his reputation.” Perhaps He recorded it in his she had learned from Constanze of the 500 gul- personal catalog without den Mozart lent Stadler, a hefty sum that was still a date, right after The unpaid when officials tallied the composer’s estate. Magic Flute and La Stadler’s true debt to Mozart is one clarinet- clemenza di Tito. The only ists still owe him today: pages upon pages of later entry is the little music as precious as any in the repertory. It’s Masonic Cantata, dated likely that Mozart first heard Stadler play in November 15, 1791. The Requiem, as we know, March 1784, in a performance of his B-flat wind didn’t make it into the list. serenade (K. 361). The Clarinet Trio, written two For decades the history of the Requiem was years later and supposedly finished in a bowling full of ambiguity, while that of the Clarinet alley on one of the many occasions when Mozart Concerto seemed quite clear. But in recent couldn’t separate music from life, may have been years, as we learned more about the unfinished composed with Stadler in mind. By 1789, the Requiem, questions about the concerto began year of the magnificent Quintet for Clarinet and to emerge. The Requiem riddles are now largely Strings (K. 581), virtually every note Mozart solved, damaging a fair amount of romantic wrote for the instrument, including the added myth and cinematic drama in the process. But an clarinet parts for the great G minor symphony, accurate account of the Clarinet Concerto seems was written for Stadler. more uncertain today than ever. We now come to the last year of Mozart’s life. Let’s start with Anton Stadler. Mozart tells us In late August 1791, Mozart set off for Prague to that he wrote the concerto for this great virtuoso supervise the first performances of La clemenza clarinet player, a close friend, a fellow Mason di Tito, accompanied by Stadler, who was to play (although a member of a different lodge), and, on in the Prague orchestra; Franz Xaver Süssmayr, numerous occasions, a spirited gambling com- who would soon inherit the task of finishing panion. Mozart enjoyed Stadler’s friendship and the Requiem; and Constanze. Mozart worked admired his talent, easily accepting that the latter on the opera in the coach, writing two virtuoso was infinitely more generous and reliable than the obbligato solos for Stadler. The premiere on former. The musical skill was evidently prodi- September 6 was decently received, though the gious: “One would never have thought,” wrote a empress Maria Luisa is said to have shouted from critic in 1785, “that a clarinet could imitate the her box, “Una porcheria tedesca!” (“German human voice to such perfection.” But Sophie rubbish,” to use the imperial translation.) Mozart Haibel, Mozart’s sister-in-law, remembered returned home to Vienna, leaving Stadler behind Stadler as one of the composer’s “false friends, to accept thunderous applause and cheers from COMPOSED November 18, 1961, Orchestra November 11, 12 & 14, 2004, Orchestra September–November 1791 Hall. Clark Brody as soloist, John Hall. Larry Combs as soloist, Semyon Weicher conducting Bychkov conducting FIRST PERFORMANCE Date unknown MOST RECENT INSTRUMENTATION CSO PERFORMANCES solo clarinet, two flutes, two bassoons, FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES July 11, 2003, Ravinia Festival. two horns, strings July 25, 1957, Ravinia Festival. Reginald Richard Stoltzman as soloist, Peter Kell as soloist, Georg Solti conducting Oundjian conducting APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 28 minutes 3 his fellow orchestra But by the time the Clarinet Concerto was members for his big published, a decade after Mozart’s death, solos each night. Stadler’s basset clarinet had gone out of favor, On September 28, and the concerto was printed in a version Mozart entered The rewritten for the narrower range of the standard Magic Flute in his clarinet. Even though a contemporary review catalog; the pre- argued that this wasn’t the music Mozart wrote, miere, two nights and Stadler was still alive to protest, players and later in a suburban audiences quickly came to accept this revised Viennese theater, version. Mozart’s autograph score has been lost. was only a partial There is, however, a fragment, 199 measures success. Sometime long and written entirely in Mozart’s hand, of a Anton Stadler, the in the middle of this concerto in G for basset horn (another ancient fellow-Mason for whom crazy schedule—two member of the clarinet family) that nearly dupli- Mozart wrote his Clarinet opera premieres in cates more than half of the first movement of Concerto. Anonymous less than a month, the Clarinet Concerto. Apparently Mozart first silhouette plus work on a conceived this music for basset horn, perhaps as requiem that had early as 1787, and later rewrote and finished it recently been commissioned through a mysteri- for Stadler’s modified clarinet. We can’t be sure ous messenger—Mozart began what would be for whom the earlier concerto was intended, his last concerto, for Stadler’s clarinet. But there’s nor why he chose to rewrite it for Stadler at no mention of the concerto until October 7, one of the most hectic times in his life. But when Mozart wrote to Constanze, who had gone we do know that Mozart had nothing to do to Baden, boasting that after with the version for standard she left he played two games clarinet—the one that gen- of billiards, sold his horse for erations of musicians have fourteen ducats, sent out for come to love, and the one that black coffee, and smoked a Stephen Williamson performs splendid pipe of tobacco before this week. orchestrating “almost the whole Rondo for Stadler.” A letter he concerto is one of dated October 14 (Mozart’s Mozart’s most per- last) describes the evening sonal creations; like Mozart took Salieri to see The theT final piano concerto, it’s Magic Flute, an outing unfairly as intimate and conversational embellished in Peter Shaffer’s as chamber music, rather than Amadeus. Little more than a grand and dramatic. We can’t month later, Mozart fell ill; he blame historians—or play- died in less than three weeks. wrights for that matter—for We come now to the ques- suggesting Mozart knew his tions, some still unanswered. Mozart’s wife Constanze. Oil time was running out, for the Around the time Mozart met portrait by Joseph Lange painted music implies as much. The Anton Stadler, he had begun to about 1782, Vienna slow movement carries an play a large new clarinet—today almost unnatural burden of called a basset clarinet, though sadness on its simple phrases; in Mozart’s day it had no particular name. This it is one of Mozart’s greatest arias and a testa- curious instrument extended the clarinet’s glori- ment to the power of music to say what words ous lower register down a major third, reaching cannot. Of the two outer movements, with their four new deep and resonant notes. It seems clear endless, natural lyricism, no words are more that this is the instrument Mozart had in mind apt than those Mozart scholar H. C. Robbins when he wrote both the celebrated quintet and Landon remembered from Shakespeare: “The this final concerto. heart dances, but not for joy.” 4 Arvo Pärt Born September 11, 1935, Paide, Estonia. Orient & Occident

In 1968, in the middle of was not guarding these notes as treasures,” he a flourishing career as a said. “I was not holding them, one after another, composer, Arvo Pärt in my hands. Every note is decisive, every note abruptly stopped writing is telling.” Because the music he began writing music. During the next in the late 1970s uses so few notes and so much eight years, after turning repetition, in a largely tonal context, Pärt often away from the dramatic has been labeled a minimalist. But Pärt’s quiet, twelve-tone works for nuanced, and deeply emotional voice has little in which he was well known common with the bracing urban sound world of in his native Estonia, he such composers as Philip Glass or Steve Reich. began to study medieval music after hearing a (“Am I really a minimalist?” Pärt once asked, snippet of Gregorian chant on the radio. This with customary detachment. “It’s not something self-imposed exile brought about one of the most that concerns me.”) Instead, Pärt has picked his remarkable stylistic changes a composer can own word, tintinnabuli, from the Latin for bells, undergo. When Pärt (pronounce Pairt) broke his to label his recent work. silence in 1976, it was with a tiny, astonishingly Pärt has steadfastly refused to talk about his spare piano piece, Für Alina, a quiet and unas- own music in detail. (“Franz Schubert explained suming score of extremely high and low notes, nothing,” he once said. “He wrote songs. They sounding like distant bells. (This music recalls are the best explaining.”) He admits few specific Pärt’s childhood experiments on the family influences, although the death of Benjamin piano, a huge concert grand with a damaged Britten in late 1976 affected him deeply at the middle register—“like a five-year-old child with time he was beginning to compose again. (“I had teeth missing,” as he once said—which forced just discovered Britten for myself,” Pärt remem- him to play only at the top and bottom of the bers. “Just before his death I began to appreciate keyboard.) “That was the first piece that was on a the unusual purity of his music.”) His few, new plateau,” Pärt says. “It was here that I carefully chosen words about his own born-again discovered the triad series, which I made my simplicity are often quoted: simple, little guiding rule.” Surprisingly, out of such familiar, old-fashioned material, Pärt was I have discovered that it is enough when a able to create something entirely new. single note is beautifully played. This one The music that has followed—and made him note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, a cult figure—is austere and meditative, suffused comforts me. I work with very few elements, with a stillness and a gentle strength that set with one voice, with two voices. I build with it apart not only from Pärt’s earlier work (“It’s the most primitive materials—with the triad as if it’s by another person,” he says), but from with one specific tonality. almost any music ever written. In his previous compositions, as Pärt told New Yorker music In 1977, Pärt wrote what are now often consid- critic Alex Ross, he later realized that there were ered his signature works: Tabula Rasa, which, as simply many notes thrown down on the page. “I its title suggests, was written on the blank slate of

COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES APPROXIMATE 1999–2000 These are the first Chicago Symphony PERFORMANCE TIME Orchestra performances. 7 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE September 30, 2000; Berlin, Germany INSTRUMENTATION string orchestra

5 his newfound style; the first in an extended family sonority or mood feels notable. The score is built of pieces called Fratres (Brothers); and the Cantus of the simplest of materials—blocks of dense in memoriam Benjamin Britten. (The CSO has per- chords and a continuous melody colored with formed both Fratres and the Britten memorial.) exotic intervals and embellishments, like some Fratres, in particular, has remained a touchstone ancient Eastern cantillation. These contrasting for Pärt; he has returned to it again and again elements—the Western-sounding harmonies (there are ten different versions of the work to and Eastern-tinted melodies, the solid chordal date); it also has represented a point of stability, a pillars and flowing monody—distill the essence kind of musical home base, even as Pärt and his of different cultures and eras into one power- family immigrated, first to Vienna and then to ful stream of music. Pärt’s score suggests that Berlin. In recent years, Pärt has written mostly a new kind of music—and in fact a sense of for chorus or small vocal ensemble. A few works, harmony—may be emerging from the disparate including Orient & Occident, the 2000 piece that strands of today’s discordant global conversation. is performed at these concerts, are scored for A footnote. Arvo Pärt turned eighty in larger ensembles of strings. Even though these are September. Last summer, at an exhibition in miniatures, they often seem surprisingly monu- Manchester, England, he was paired with the mental in their gestures and ideas. (Lamentate of painter Gerard Richter, who turned eighty-four 2002, his first work in many years that could be on February 9. The two men have become considered symphonic in scope, is a homage to the friends in recent years. In Manchester, Richter sculpture Marsyas by Anish Kapoor, the artist of unveiled eight new paintings dedicated to the Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park.) composer, and a tiny new choral work by Pärt, Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima, which is dedicated n Orient & Occident, Pärt works wonders to Richter, was performed each day in the gallery with his characteristic economy of means. spaces—a rare exchange between two artists at I Every gesture carries weight; each shift in the peak of their powers.

6 Pyotr Tchaikovsky Born May 7, 1840, Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48

In the autumn of 1880, work at the Moscow Conservatory in December, Tchaikovsky worked on the public didn’t hear the serenade until the two pieces simultaneously. following October. It was a great success—the One, commissioned for waltz movement had to be repeated—and when the unveiling of a Tchaikovsky’s former teacher Anton Rubinstein Pushkin memorial in conducted it that June, he finally showed the sort Moscow, was a tiresome of enthusiasm he had so carefully withheld in the project—“What can you past by declaring it Tchaikovsky’s best piece. write on the occasion of the opening of an chaikovsky told Mme von Meck that exhibition except banalities and generally noisy the first movement—“in the form of passages?” he asked. Tchaikovsky said that he a sonatina,” as the score indicates— wrote it “with no warm feeling of love, and wasT in deliberate imitation of Mozart’s style. therefore there will probably be no artistic merits There’s nothing particularly Mozartean about in it.” Although Tchaikovsky assumed that the it, although it’s probably the kind of music 1812 Overture would prove “unsuitable for Tchaikovsky imagined he would have composed symphony concerts,” its bombast and excitement, had he lived in Mozart’s time. The freshness and capped by the firing of real cannon, quickly made charm of the whole serenade, though, confirm it an audience favorite, as well as a staple of how enchanted Tchaikovsky was by Mozart’s Independence Day celebrations throughout the Magic Flute, which he had rediscovered that United States, a country Tchaikovsky had visited summer. The second-movement waltz is prime only once. Tchaikovsky and features one of his best mel- The other work of that autumn is this serenade odies. The deeply expressive elegy that follows for strings, composed “from inner conviction,” in begins with the same ascending scale that Tchaikovsky’s words. “It is a heartfelt piece and launched the waltz tune. The finale is indebted so, I dare to think, is not lacking in real quali- to two folk songs, one for the introduction, the ties,” he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck, in whom other as the principal theme of the Allegro. The he often confided. Tchaikovsky began sketching coda reveals that this exuberant folk melody on September 21, thinking at first that this and the broad and solemn theme that opened would be a symphony or a string quartet, later the serenade are, in fact, distant relatives. that it was a suite for string orchestra, and finally, before it was completed on November 4, that he would call it a serenade. Although Tchaikovsky Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the was surprised with a private performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.

COMPOSED August 15, 1959, Ravinia Festival. New INSTRUMENTATION September 21–November 4, 1880 York City Ballet as soloists, Robert string orchestra Irving conducting FIRST PERFORMANCE APPROXIMATE October 30, 1881; Saint Petersburg, MOST RECENT PERFORMANCE TIME Russia CSO PERFORMANCES 29 minutes July 21, 1998, Ravinia Festival. Itzhak FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES Perlman conducting CSO RECORDING November 24 & 25, 1893, 1966. Morton Gould conducting. November 26 & 27, 2004, Orchestra Auditorium Theatre. Theodore RCA (Waltz) Hall. Pinchas Zukerman conducting Thomas conducting

© 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra 7