Christoph Von Dohnányi Conductor Paul Lewis Piano Lutosławski Musique Funèbre Beethoven Piano Concerto No
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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, May 1, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, May 2, 2014, at 1:30 Saturday, May 3, 2014, at 8:00 Christoph von Dohnányi Conductor Paul Lewis Piano Lutosławski Musique funèbre Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37 Allegro con brio Largo Rondo: Allegro PAUL LEWIS INTERMISSION Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 (Pathétique) Adagio—Allegro non troppo Allegro con grazia Allegro molto vivace Finale: Adagio lamentoso The appearance of Paul Lewis is endowed in part by the Johnson & Livingston Families Fund for Piano Performance. 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 Witold Lutosławski Born January 25, 1913, Warsaw, Poland. Died February 7, 1994, Warsaw, Poland. Musique funèbre When Lutosławski’s new to me, but it is certainly not my last one.” Concerto for Orchestra As the American critic Everett Helm reported was fi rst performed in in Th e Musical Quarterly after the work was 1954, it was immediately played in Warsaw at the International Festival of compared to Béla Bartók’s Contemporary Music that same year, the score landmark score of the “employs twelve-tone technique in a personal same name. Lutosławski’s idiom and in a fashion that the composer has was the fi rst important worked out over a number of years.” From concerto for orchestra that point on, the way that Lutosławski freely composed in the shadow incorporated the techniques and gestures of strict of Bartók’s 1943 masterwork, and, at the time, twelve-tone music into his own highly individ- that appears to have inspired rather than intimi- ual language proved to be one of the miracles dated Lutosławski. Although he would later of late twentieth-century music. Th e Funeral dismiss the work as immature and Music, then, is at once a farewell to Bartók unrepresentative—“I wrote as I was able, since I and his musical world, and, at the same time, could not yet write as I wished”—the concerto Lutosławski’s own calling card. helped launch his international career. But it was Th e score unfolds in four connected phases, with his next major work, dedicated to Bartók’s beginning with a funeral cortège and building, memory—this Musique funèbre (Funeral music) in intensity and rhythmic complexity, toward a for string orchestra—that Lutosławski found his great, sustained, triple-forte chord containing own voice. all twelve tones. It is a fi erce and alarming blow, “For me this is the beginning of a new period,” from which the music never fully recovers, and Lutosławski said at the time of the premiere in in the epilogue, silence carries as much weight as 1958. “Th is is my fi rst word spoken in a language the notes themselves. COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1954–1968 July 31, 1966, Ravinia Festival. Seiji string orchestra Ozawa conducting FIRST PERFORMANCE APPROXIMATE April 18, 19 & 20, 1968, Orchestra Hall. March 26, 1958; Katowice, Poland PERFORMANCE TIME Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt conducting 14 minutes MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES January 20, 21, 22, 23 & 26, 1999, Orchestra Hall. Pinchas Zukerman conducting 2 Ludwig van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany. Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria. Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37 We’re not certain that few lessons from Mozart before his teacher was Beethoven and Mozart suddenly called home by the news of his mother’s ever met. Th eir names failing health. Th ere is, however, no mention of were mentioned in the Mozart in a letter Beethoven wrote at the time. same breath as early as When late in 1792, Beethoven returned to 1783, when Beethoven’s Vienna, where he would stay for the rest of his fi rst composition teacher, life, it was to study with Haydn, for Mozart lay Christian Gottlob Neefe, in an unmarked grave. We can sense disappoint- wrote these words in the ment in the famous words Count Waldstein earliest public notice of inscribed in the album that served as a farewell his promising pupil: “Th is youthful genius is gift from Beethoven’s friends: deserving of help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Wolfgang You are going to Vienna in fulfi llment of Amadeus Mozart were he to continue as he your long-frustrated wishes. Th e Genius of has begun.” Mozart is still mourning and weeping over Neefe was suggesting that, with proper spon- the death of her pupil. She found a refuge sorship, his young pupil could tour the music but no occupation with the inexhaustible capitals and entertain kings with his dazzling Haydn; through him she wishes once more keyboard talent—like most musicians, Neefe to form a union with another. With the help assumed that Mozart would make his reputa- of assiduous labor you shall receive Mozart’s tion as a virtuoso performer, not as a composer. spirit from Haydn’s hands. Neefe didn’t live long enough to understand how limited his view was, but he did see his Beethoven arrived in Vienna in the second prize student take the fi rst steps to becoming week of November 1792. He quickly realized not a second Mozart, but more importantly, the that Haydn had little to teach him and took mature Beethoven. comfort in the fact that he was welcome in the It’s likely that these two great composers did same homes where Mozart was once popular. meet early in 1787, when the sixteen-year-old To Beethoven, Vienna was Mozart’s city. Beethoven made his fi rst trip from his native Th e fi rst music he published there was a set Bonn to Vienna, to breathe the air of a sophis- of variations for violin and piano on “Se vuol ticated musical city. Beethoven stayed no more ballare” from Mozart’s Th e Marriage of Figaro. than two weeks, and he may even have taken a In March 1795, he played Mozart’s D minor COMPOSED MOST RECENT CADENZAS 1800; sketches date to the mid-1790s CSO PERFORMANCES Beethoven December 8, 9 & 10, 2011, Orchestra FIRST PERFORMANCE Hall. Jeremy Denk as soloist, Michael APPROXIMATE April 5, 1803, Vienna. With the Tilson Thomas conducting PERFORMANCE TIME composer as soloist 34 minutes July 11, 2013, Ravinia Festival. Emanuel Ax as soloist, Christoph von FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES CSO RECORDINGS Dohnányi conducting December 16 & 17, 1910, Orchestra 1959. Gary Graff man as soloist, Walter Hall. Ernest Hutcheson as soloist, Hendl conducting. RCA INSTRUMENTATION Frederick Stock conducting solo piano, two fl utes, two oboes, two 1971. Vladimir Ashkenazy as soloist, clarinets, two horns, two trumpets, Georg Solti conducting. London timpani, strings 1983. Alfred Brendel as soloist, James Levine conducting. Philips 3 piano concerto (K. 466) at a concert organized a quarrelsome revolutionary, heard the resem- by the composer’s widow Constanze. (He later blance in this music—both in its details as well wrote cadenzas for it as well, the only concerto by as its spirit and sensibility. Certainly the way Mozart he so honored.) And on April 2, 1800, the soloist continues to play right after the first at his historic first public concert, Beethoven movement cadenza up to the final bar can be included a symphony by Mozart on the program, found only in K. 491 among all of Mozart’s which also was supposed to have introduced his piano concertos. Beethoven’s opening theme, brand new piano concerto (his third) in C minor. too, tosses a glance at Mozart’s. But on the big For reasons that we will never know, however, issues—how the music moves forward, the way Beethoven played one of his earlier concer- it approaches the turning points in its progress— tos instead. there is less agreement. As Donald Tovey pointed out, Beethoven doesn’t yet seem to have figured his C minor piano concerto is one of a out what Mozart always understood—that you handful of works in which the spirits of shouldn’t give too much away before the soloist Mozart and Beethoven convene. To sug- enters and the drama really begins. There are gest,T as some writers do, that Beethoven modeled touches of pure Beethoven, like the unannounced his concerto after Mozart’s own C minor piano entry of the timpani just after the cadenza—a concerto (K. 491) is to confuse the deepest kind complete surprise, even though it has been of artistic inheritance with plagiarism. The thoughtfully prepared by a main theme that imi- choice of key certainly can’t be taken as a homage tates the beating of a drum every time it appears. to Mozart, for Beethoven seemed unable to get There’s nothing Mozartean about Beethoven’s C minor out of his system at the time. (Think of choice of key for the central slow movement: the Pathétique Sonata, or, a bit later, the funeral E major, with its key signature of four sharps, is march from the Eroica Symphony, the Coriolan bold and unexpected in a concerto in C minor, Overture, and, of course, the Fifth Symphony.) with three flats. For a moment the first E major Obviously, Beethoven remembered Mozart’s chord, given to the piano alone, seems all wrong, C minor concerto when he was writing his as if the soloist’s hands have landed in the wrong own—they share too many musical details place; at the same time, it’s fresh and irresistible.