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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 Saturday, May 31, 2014, at 8:00 Tuesday, June 3, 2014, at 7:30 Jaap van Zweden Conductor Shostakovich Five Fragments, Op. 42 TRUTH TO Moderato Andante POWER Largo Moderato Allegretto First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Britten Sinfonia da requiem, Op. 20 Lacrymosa— Dies irae— Requiem aeternum INTERMISSION Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100 Andante Allegro moderato Adagio Allegro giocoso The Truth to Power Festival is made possible with a generous leadership gift from The Grainger Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Richard and Mary L. Gray; U.S. Equities Realty, LLC and the Susan and Robert Wislow Charitable Foundation; Mr. & Mrs. Richard J. Franke; and The Wayne Balmer Grantor Trust. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBEZ 91.5FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Truth to Power Festival. 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 Daniel Jaff é Phillip Huscher Dmitri Shostakovich Born September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia. Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia. Five Fragments, Op. 42 It is often said that had will take the place of Th e Rhinegold. Th e driving Shostakovich not been image of the next opera will be the heroine of the publicly censured by the People’s Will movement.” Pravda editorial in 1936, which attacked his he People’s Will movement was a hitherto highly acclaimed nineteenth-century Russian terrorist opera Lady Macbeth of organization most widely remem- Mtsensk, he would have beredT for assassinating Tsar Alexander II on become one of the March 13, 1881. From the surviving opening twentieth century’s page of the opera’s libretto, and the recollec- leading opera composers. Certainly the Pravda tion by Shostakovich’s close colleague Levon editorial all but shut down Shostakovich’s Atovmian of the rest of the opera’s scenario, activity as a composer for the stage, forcing him Digonskaia was able to identify the opening folio to decisively turn to symphonic composition. Yet, of Shostakovich’s fair copy of the score. It is a there is substantial evidence that the process had curious document, since its opening scene starts started earlier, most obviously with his composi- with an orchestrated version of what is known tion of the wild and inventive Fourth Symphony today as the A minor fugue from Shostakovich’s in 1935–36, and—less well-known—the Five 24 Preludes and Fugues, usually said to have Fragments being performed at this concert. been composed in 1950 (on the basis of the Th e picture has been further complicated composer’s annotation in that cycle’s manu- by some crucial recent discoveries by the chief script). In fact, the original manuscript of that archivist of the Shostakovich Archives in fugue—to which Shostakovich referred when Moscow, Olga Digonskaia. Having discovered writing in July 1934 to his latest paramour, Elena and identifi ed the opening folio of Shostakovich’s Konstantinovskaia, as one of three “exceed- proposed sequel to Lady Macbeth, Digonskaia ingly boring fugues”—has been discovered, suggests that the fi nale of the Fourth Symphony dated July 25, 1934, in the composer’s own and the Five Fragments were both off shoots hand. Immediately following that orchestrated of that aborted opera. Th is, as Shostakovich fugue is around forty-fi ve bars of an aria which explained early in 1934, was intended to be reappears, with some amendments including the second part of “an operatic tetralogy about reorchestration, in the fi nale of Shostakovich’s women,” which he himself described as “a Soviet Fourth Symphony—that is, the start of the Ring of the Nibelungs, in which Lady Macbeth “dance suite” midway through that movement. COMPOSED INSTRUMENTATION APPROXIMATE 1935 fl ute and piccolo, oboe and english PERFORMANCE TIME horn, clarinet, e-fl at clarinet and bass 9 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE clarinet, bassoon and contrabassoon, April 26, 1965, Leningrad two horns, trumpet, trombone, tuba, percussion, harp, strings FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s fi rst performances. 2 So why did Shostakovich abandon an opera to the A minor fugue from which it ultimately of which, as the surviving folio indicates, he had derived). Digonskaia surmises from this, and composed enough to at least begin making a the apparent chronology of composition, that fair copy? Its scenario, almost certainly, was the Five Fragments was not merely—as has previ- problem. Briefly, it concerns a tsarist general who ously been supposed—an experimental work in marries a young woman (whom Shostakovich preparation for the Fourth Symphony, but almost named after his beloved), Elena, little knowing certainly derives largely or entirely from material that she is connected to the People’s Will. Elena’s originally intended for the People’s Will opera. true beloved, a member of that organization, plots to kill the general by hurling a bomb parsely scored and succinct, each frag- at him. When he has a last-minute failure of ment has a distinct atmosphere. The first nerve, Elena seizes the bomb and throws it fragment, Moderato, scored primarily for herself at the general, getting herself killed with Swoodwinds, is lean and contrapuntal in a manner her husband. reminiscent of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. The The opera’s scenario became a political hot second, Andante, is possibly a grotesque portrait potato when, on December 1, 1934, Leningrad’s of the general: starting with heavy-footed brass, First Secretary, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated. the music then parodies the fusty manners of a Just four weeks later, Shostakovich denounced bygone age (note the bassoon’s mock-baroque (as he was bound to) the “base and foul murder manners), then seamlessly melds into a march of Sergei Mironovich Kirov” in Leningradskaia with pompously martial rhythms. In total Pravda; in the same article, he described his pro- contrast the third fragment, Largo, is a noc- jected opera merely as “the opera about women turnal soundscape scored for strings—slowly of the past,” with no mention at all about the drifting like an atmospheric Charles Ives tone People’s Will, let alone the opera’s culminating poem (might Bernard Herrmann have heard assassination, which could all too easily have been this before scoring Psycho?)—plus occasional perceived as an apologia for the “Trotskyite” ter- harp, most striking in the bell-like tolling rorists supposedly responsible for Kirov’s death. towards the end. The fourth, Moderato, starts Shostakovich then quietly dropped the project. with a solo horn twice offering a single note as if proffering a starting pitch to his colleagues. ow does Five Fragments fit into this? Bassoon, then clarinet, then oboe then enter in Written in a single day (on June 9, fuguelike succession, then twine indecisively as 1935), its apparently phenomenal speed if in cogitation, eventually leaving the floor to Hof composition would have been facilitated if all the oboe. The nocturnal strings of the previous five movements were based or simply adapted fragment are briefly heard before the “tuning from already composed material. As Digonskaia up” horn rounds off the movement. In the final has discovered, Shostakovich’s fair copy of Five fragment, Allegretto, a snare drum’s parade Fragments (as opposed to his sketches for that ground rasps unexpectedly provide accompa- work) was written in the same black ink and on niment to a solo violin, which plays the waltz the same type of manuscript paper as the open- theme common to the finale of the Fourth ing folio of the opera. Furthermore, Symphony Symphony. Flute, then clarinet and bass clarinet, no. 4 has a theme common to Five Fragments, briefly join the dance before it peters out. which appears to suggest a common source (rather as the symphony contains a theme related —Daniel Jaffé 3 Benjamin Britten Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, Sussex, England. Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England. Sinfonia da requiem, Op. 20 Benjamin Britten and his hat winter, Britten toured the Midwest; friend Peter Pears left he came back from Chicago in England for North February with a “vile cold & fl u” that America in May 1939. heT couldn’t shake. He was further troubled After spending several by homesickness, “war or no war,” and by the days in Canada, they growing European confl ict viewed from afar. crossed into this country Around this time, Britten was asked by the in June, stopping fi rst in British Council to compose a new work to Grand Rapids, Michigan, celebrate “the reigning dynasty of a foreign then moving on to New power.” He agreed to this enigmatic commis- York City and the Catskills, where they visited sion as long as “no form of musical jingoism” Aaron Copland. Th ere Britten composed some was required. By the time the details had been music “inspired by such sunshine as I’ve never worked out and Britten learned that the score seen before.” He wrote home to his sister Beth: “I would honor the 2,600th anniversary of the am certain that N. America is the place of the Japanese Imperial dynasty, there was little time future . & though certainly one is worried by a left to compose the music. On April 26, 1940, lack of culture, there is terrifi c energy & vitality he wrote to his sister, “I now fi nd myself with in the place.” the proposition of writing a symphony in about Copland later recalled that Britten was deeply three weeks!” Britten described the score as “a worried about the prospect of war at that time, short symphony—or symphonic poem,” and and he couldn’t decide whether to return to he told a reporter for Th e New York Sun that he England or not.