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PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, February 26, 2015, at 8:00 Friday, February 27, 2015, at 1:30 Saturday, February 28, 2015, at 8:00 Tuesday, March 3, 2015, at 7:30 Riccardo Muti Conductor Scriabin Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 29 Andante Allegro Andante Tempestoso Maestoso INTERMISSION Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 (Pathétique) Adagio—Allegro non troppo Allegro con grazia Allegro molto vivace Finale: Adagio lamentoso This concert series is made possible by the Juli Grainger Endowment. 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 Phillip Huscher Alexander Scriabin Born January 6, 1872 [December 25, 1871, old style], Moscow, Russia. Died April 27, 1915, Moscow, Russia. Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 29 From his youth, when he etudes, and even Polish mazurkas. To study the interpreted the signifi- first nineteen opus numbers in Scriabin’s catalog, cance of his birth on all pieces for piano solo, one would never pre- Christmas Day as a sign dict the important orchestral music that would that he should do great quickly follow. things, Scriabin believed he would play a decisive he move away from writing solo piano role in the history of music was a tough and decisive step for all music. But his early death the pianist-composers of the nineteenth at the age of forty-three century,T but Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and cut short his career just as he was venturing into Brahms were already mature artists with individual pioneer territory. Like many composers of a less and recognizable styles when they stopped com- revolutionary bent, Scriabin started his musical posing exclusively for the piano. But when Scriabin life as a pianist and his composing career writing wrote a piano concerto in 1896—the first of his only piano pieces. In 1884, he began to study works to call for orchestra—he had not yet dis- piano with Nicolai Zverev, who had already covered the voice that would ultimately make his accepted Sergei Rachmaninov as a pupil. The two music unique. The Chopinesque concerto scarcely students became good friends—Scriabin was hints at the direction Scriabin’s career would take. older by just one year—though they were some- Then, three years later, he began his first symphony times later portrayed as rivals once their musical (performed by the CSO under Riccardo Muti last ambitions ventured in different directions. At the month), and a new world of complex sounds and time they met, both Scriabin and Rachmaninov philosophical ideas opened up before him. He were beginning to compose piano pieces for was now on the path to becoming, as the novelist themselves to play. In 1888, Scriabin entered the Boris Pasternak later said of him, “more than just Moscow Conservatory, where he excelled equally a composer.” Within a year after he completed as a pianist and composer. When he graduated in his first symphony, he eagerly began and quickly 1892, he was awarded the second gold medal in finished a second—the work that is performed this composition (Rachmaninov took first place, for week—as if he had found his true calling at last. his opera Aleko). But the traditional form of the symphony would After Scriabin left the conservatory, he began only briefly satisfy Scriabin’s musical ambitions. a career as a concert pianist. While his recital All three of the works he called symphony were programs often included music by Schumann and composed within a five-year period, and already Liszt, two composers who also started out as pia- with the third, Scriabin felt the need for a descrip- nists, Scriabin’s particular favorite was Chopin. tive subtitle, The Divine Poem, recognizing that That influence is reflected not only in his reper- his ideas were beginning to outgrow the sym- toire, but in the titles and nature of the music he phonic model. He did not even bother to label the wrote at the time—sets of preludes, impromptus, two grand orchestral pieces he wrote afterward, COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES four horns, three trumpets, three 1901 November 13, 14 & 15, 1969, Orchestra trombones, tuba, timpani, Hall. Georg Semkow conducting percussion, strings FIRST PERFORMANCE January 12, 1902; Saint Petersburg, INSTRUMENTATION APPROXIMATE Russia three flutes and piccolo, two oboes, PERFORMANCE TIME three clarinets, two bassoons, 48 minutes 2 The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, as sympho- merely produced military parade music, despite nies. Both of those works are single-movement the grandeur of his ambitions, and considered tone poems, if any conventional title can do rewriting it, but by then he had given up on pure justice to their extraordinary form and substance. symphonic form altogether.) ike his First Symphony, Scriabin’s Second he Second Symphony, like Scriabin’s is a score that shows the composer working First, fell flat at the premiere, given under comfortably within the symphonic tradi- Liadov’s baton in Saint Petersburg, in Ltion, and yet, at the same time, yearning to break January 1902.T There were boos and catcalls, and free of its conventions and limitations. “What a the work was hardly better received in Moscow symphony, but what kind?” the composer Anatoly a year later. Scriabin was devastated, but he had Liadov scribbled on the margin of the manuscript already moved on to a third symphony, which he of Symphony no. 2 when he studied it for the first would call The Divine Poem. Oddly, even after that time. Instead of the First Symphony’s unexpected work and The Poem of Ecstasy were programmed six movements, Scriabin now writes five—as close with some regularity—the CSO played The Divine as he would come to the standard four-movement Poem almost annually in the 1920s and ’30s—and layout. Scriabin’s opening movement is really Scriabin became a kind of cult favorite, his first a true introduction, for it introduces central two symphonies have remained largely over- thematic ideas that will govern the music that looked. When Riccardo Muti led Symphony no. 1 follows: a dynamic Allegro (in regulation sonata here (and in Carnegie Hall) earlier this year, the form), an atmospheric and lyrical slow movement Chicago Symphony was playing the piece for the colored by the sounds of birdcalls, a tempestuous first time. The Orchestra has played Symphony and driven scherzo, and a grand triumphant finale. no. 2 just once before—nearly a half century ago. The Second Symphony is still grounded in the spirit of the nineteenth-century masters Scriabin n the few years he had left after composing revered—it reflects what Scriabin, a conservatory his Second Symphony, Scriabin ventured professor at the time, spoke of as the difficulty of farther into the great unknown, where music teaching other people’s music while writing his Iand color are closely linked, and where “art must own. But it also is the work of a composer with unite with philosophy and religion in an indivis- his own individual voice—to this day, no other ible whole to form a new gospel.” After his Fifth music sounds quite like Scriabin’s—and it marks Piano Sonata, composed in 1907, he broke with an advance over Scriabin’s own first symphony in tonality. A single dissonant chord, the so-called the sophistication of its thematic development, mystic chord, provided the foundation for all of the brilliant yet subtle coloring of its orchestra- his final compositions. He had, in effect, created tion, and its success in unifying a large structure a new system of tonal organization to replace through the recurrence of the main musical ideas. traditional harmony. After his death, no one truly The heart of the score is its sumptuously followed his path (Prokofiev and Szymanowski colored central slow movement, which opens briefly came under his spell), and, in the end, and closes with the flute imitating the sounds despite the urgency and fierce passion of his ideas, of birds, so unexpected in a symphony written he did not—to use current parlance—make a in the opening years of the twentieth century— difference. Stravinsky, who disliked both Scriabin and some four decades ahead of the celebrated and his music, once commented, “Although his birdsong in the music by Olivier Messiaen. (The death was tragic and premature, I have sometimes Chicago Symphony plays Messiaen’s masterwork, wondered at the kind of music such a man would the Turangalîla-symphonie, under Esa-Pekka have written had he survived into the 1920s.” Salonen in May.) As in his first symphony, Scriabin’s original language was, in its own Scriabin wanted to write a finale with universal way, as revolutionary as that of Mahler, Strauss, appeal—something so simple and captivating Schoenberg, or Debussy, all of whom were that it would move all people. His solution here writing at the same time. It is difficult to know is a straightforward triumphant march in 4/4 where Scriabin was headed, and how he might time and in C major. (Scriabin later feared he had ultimately have changed the course of music. 3 Piotr Tchaikovsky Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 (Pathétique) Five days after he con- last days that still persists today. In 1979, the ducted the premiere of this Russian émigré musicologist Alexandra Orlova symphony, Tchaikovsky published a now-infamous article proposing drank a glass of unboiled that Tchaikovsky had in fact committed suicide water, a careless move that by poison, on the orders of his fellow alumni year in Saint Petersburg, of the School of Jurisprudence, to cover up where countless cases of his alleged affair with the nephew of Duke cholera had recently been Stenbock-Thurmor.