PROGRAM

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

Thursday, March 17, 2016, at 8:00 Friday, March 18, 2016, at 1:30 Saturday, March 19, 2016, at 8:00

Michael Tilson Thomas Conductor Emanuel Ax Stravinsky Scherzo à la russe Beethoven Piano No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58 Allegro moderato Andante con moto— Rondo: Vivace EMANUEL AX

INTERMISSION

Sibelius Symphony No. 2 in , Op. 43 Allegretto Andante, ma rubato Vivacissimo— Finale: Allegro moderato

This work is part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective, which is generously sponsored by the Sargent Family Foundation. 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

Igor Stravinsky Born June 18, 1882, Oranienbaum, . Died April 6, 1971, . Scherzo à la russe

This little piece has a big A master of economical recycling, history: it began as music Stravinsky immediately chose to reuse North for , was replaced Star material to fulfill a commission from with a score by Aaron Whiteman, the jazzman who had first made Copland (with by his name in the world of symphonic music by Ira Gershwin), recycled commissioning Gershwin to write Rhapsody for Paul Whiteman and in Blue nearly two decades earlier. Whiteman his jazz , and finally and his band gave the premiere in a radio revamped as a work for broadcast in September 1944. Stravinsky full symphony orchestra. soon re-orchestrated his miniature as a jovial What Stravinsky originally set out to write in curtain-raiser for symphony , and 1943 was, first of all, “not ‘film music,’ which led the premiere with the San Francisco is . . . an emotional counterpart to scenery, but Symphony in 1946. music for film use,” as he later made clear in Memories and Commentaries, the 1960 set of elying its origins in a war film, the published conversations with Robert Craft. Scherzo à la russe is a genial little (With Craft’s death this past November, we have Russian-style scherzo—literally a lost one of our few vital links to the great Bjoke, from scherzare, to joke or to jest—like a ’s life and work.) Whatever his objec- scene from Stravinsky’s earlier Petrushka or tive, he soon parted company with the filmmak- something out of The Fairy’s Kiss. It takes as ers of The North Star. (The film by Samuel its starting point the sound of a village band, Goldwyn, a piece of wartime propaganda with a launched with a barrage of -like screenplay by Lillian Hellman and starring Anne triads. Even within its tiny four-minute Baxter and Walter Huston, went on to receive six framework, Stravinsky finds room to insert Academy Award nominations, including one for two separate trios before returning to the Copland. He lost to Alfred Newman.) village square.

COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1944 July 13, 1963, . The two and , two , two composer , two , four horns, FIRST PERFORMANCE three , three January 15 & 17, 1970, Orchestra Hall. March 22, 1946, San Francisco. and , , percussion, , conducting The composer conducting piano, strings MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME December 14, 15 & 16, 1989, Orchestra 4 minutes Hall. Leonard Slatkin conducting August 2, 1996, Ravinia Festival. Christoph Eschenbach conducting

2 Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany. Died March 26, 1827, , Austria. No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58

On December 17, 1808, a doubt wretched, for had gone badly. Viennese paper announced For one thing, Beethoven had so annoyed the a to be given by members of the Theater an der Wien orchestra Ludwig van Beethoven at the previous month that they now insisted that the Theater an der Wien he sit in the anteroom whenever he wasn’t needed five days later: “All the at the keyboard and wait for the to pieces are of his own check with him between movements. Beethoven composition, entirely new, was so desperate to see this concert take place and not yet heard in that he agreed. (It promised him both wide public.” Although exposure and a nice profit.) Beethoven’s publicist fudged that last detail ever Not surprisingly, there wasn’t enough time for so slightly, the list of world premieres lined up for the orchestra to learn so much challenging new one evening is astonishing: both the Fifth and music. Reichardt remembered that “it had been Sixth ; the Choral Fantasy; and this found impossible to get a single full work, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. (Those for all the pieces to be performed, every one of who didn’t like too much new and unfamiliar them filled with the greatest difficulties.” The music at one sitting surely stayed home that Choral Fantasy, which Beethoven composed at night.) To round out this substantial program— the very last moment (inexplicably thinking the long even by the generous standards of the concert lacked a blockbuster finish), was scarcely nineteenth century—were three movements from rehearsed at all. When it broke down completely the Mass in C, the concert Ah! perfido, and during the performance, Beethoven started it at the keyboard by the composer. over again from the beginning, making a very “There we sat from 6:30 till 10:30,” the long evening even longer. composer J.F. Reichardt later recalled, “in the most bitter cold, and found by experience that y all reports, Beethoven was a terrifically one might have too much even of a good thing.” exciting pianist. He played with spectac- What should have been the greatest night of ular technical facility and tremendous Beethoven’s career was ruined by too much music Bemotional expression. According to his student and too little heat. The performances were no Ferdinand Ries, he cared less about missed notes

COMPOSED MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE 1805–06 CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME June 13, 14, 15 & 18, 2013, Orchestra 34 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCES Hall. Rudolf Buchbinder as soloist, March 1807 (private); Vienna, Austria. Riccardo Muti conducting CSO RECORDINGS The composer as soloist 1942. Artur Schnabel as soloist, July 24, 2014, Ravinia Festival. conducting. RCA December 22, 1808; Vienna, Austria. Jonathan Biss as soloist, James The composer as soloist Conlon conducting 1963. Van Cliburn as soloist, conducting. RCA FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1972. as soloist, November 4 & 5, 1892, solo piano, one , two oboes, two Sir conducting. London . as soloist, clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, Theodore Thomas conducting two trumpets, timpani, strings 1983. as soloist, conducting. Philips July 11, 1942, Ravinia Festival. Artur Schnabel as soloist, George Beethoven Szell conducting

3 than character and expression: “Mistakes of the the most familiar one), although Beethoven other kind, he said, were due to chance, but these evidently was thinking of nothing more dramatic last resulted from want of knowledge, feeling, than the music itself when he wrote it. This or attention.” When Beethoven first stepped is a conversation between the strings and the out onstage the night of December 22, 1808, it piano. The strings, playing in staccato octaves, was to this concerto in G major, and surely begin assertively. The piano responds with rich, most members of the audience were surprised quiet chords—an answer that raises questions that he went straight to the keyboard and started of its own. On it goes, back and forth—the to play. Anyone who troubled to buy a ticket to piano steadfast, the strings gradually weak- this concert would have known that a concerto ening. Sensing victory, the piano unleashes a begins with a long orchestral exposition that brief, rhapsodic . Finally everyone plays gives you all the tunes before the soloist begins. together, sharing the same chords and the same But Beethoven had begun to examine every rhythm. Over the last chord, the piano poses convention he inherited, to rethink every choice a brand new question, to which Beethoven a composer could make. He realized that the responds by launching into the finale without only way to call greater attention to the soloist’s a pause. Our sense of boundaries is vague: in first line was to do something unexpected. In retrospect, the entire slow movement sounds like his Concerto, first performed several a long introduction to the finale. (That’s exactly months before, he had made the wait almost the case in the Waldstein , written two interminable and then sneaked the violinist in, so years before.) that if you weren’t paying attention you missed The finale itself doesn’t behave like one at first: it altogether. And here, he caught his audience it’s the only one in all of Beethoven’s completely off guard again by starting with the that doesn’t begin with the soloist stating the piano. It’s a brilliant trick—so perfectly han- main theme, followed by vigorous confirmation dled that it has hardly ever been imitated—and from the full orchestra. Here Beethoven opens Beethoven quickly follows one masterstroke with softly with the strings, in the wrong key. The another—the orchestra enters six bars later in the piano takes the situation in hand with a brilliant, unexpected key of B major. virtuosic new theme, and the rest of the move- The most remarkable thing about this bold ment is swift and thrilling. The orchestral sound and original opening is the sustained quiet is enriched by the introduction of trumpets and dynamics (beginning piano and then falling , and the solo part effectively combines off to pianissimo), as if Beethoven were sharing lyricism with bravura and elegance with wit. confidences. A tone of moderation and nobility persists throughout the first movement, even in fter the concert, Beethoven boasted the most vigorous and brilliant passages; this, that “in spite of the fact that various too, was unexpected. The movement is domi- mistakes were made, which I could not nated throughout by a gentle version of the same prevent,A the public nevertheless applauded the four-note rhythm with which Fate aggressively whole performance with enthusiasm.” Reichardt knocks on the door of the Fifth Symphony. (The particularly remembered the “new pianoforte German theorist Heinrich Schenker, who always concerto of immense difficulty, which Beethoven doubted that Beethoven had that image in mind executed astonishingly well in the most rapid when he wrote the symphony, wanted to know .” There’s no record of how much money if the concerto depicted “another door on which Beethoven made that night. His days as a celeb- Fate knocked or was someone else knocking at rity performer, however, were over. His hearing the same door?”) had recently gotten much worse, and it turned The slow movement has inspired many out that this was the last time he would appear in interpretations (Orpheus taming the Furies is public as a soloist.

4 Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland. Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland. Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 Performed as part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective

The spell of often Second Symphony, which he finished once back has a salutary effect on in Finland. artists from the North. We should not credit Italy alone with the Goethe regularly recom- warmth and ease of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, mended making the trip for years later he would return there only to write to Italy—Mendelssohn Tapiola, the bleakest of all his works. But Sibelius took his advice and did love Italy (he later admitted it was second returned with his Italian only to his native Finland), and his extended stay Symphony. Berlioz toured there in 1901 certainly had a profound effect on Italy against his better Finland’s first great composer. His sketchbooks judgment and ended up staying fifteen months, confirm that ideas conceived in Rapallo turn addicted to the countryside (Harold in Italy is the up throughout the Second Symphony, and even souvenir he brought us). Wagner claimed he got Sibelius himself admitted that Don Juan stalks the idea for the opening of in La the second movement. Spezia on the western seacoast. Tchaikovsky later Sibelius is more interesting as a composer than nursed a broken spirit in Italy and took home his as a nationalist. Ultimately, the qualities that , as untroubled as any music he give his music its own quite singular cast—the ever wrote. bracing sonorities and craggy textures, and the Jean Sibelius went to Italy in 1901. Even then quirky but compelling way his music moves his name meant fjords and bitter cold to people forward—are the product of musical genius, not who had not yet heard his music. To those who Finnish heritage. It is true that he developed had—in particular the overly popular , an abiding interest in the Kalevala, the Finnish first performed at a nationalistic pageant in national epic, as a schoolboy, and that he knew, 1899—Sibelius was of Finland. But in loved, and sometimes remembered his native folk Italy, Sibelius’s thoughts turned away from his when writing music. But he did not even homeland, and he contemplated a work based learn Finnish until he was a young man (having on Dante’s Divine . While staying in grown up in a Swedish-speaking household), and the sun-drenched seaside town of Rapallo, he his patriotism was fueled not so much by land- toyed with a four-movement tone poem, Festival, scape and congenital pride but by marriage into based on the same “Stone Guest” theme that a powerful and politically active family. It is pre- Mozart had treated in Don Giovanni. Nothing cisely because Sibelius’s music is not outwardly ever came of these ideas, but he did begin his nationalistic (of the picture-postcard variety) that

COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1902 January 1, 1904, Auditorium Theatre. two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, Theodore Thomas conducting two bassoons, four horns, three FIRST PERFORMANCE (U.S. premiere) trumpets, three trombones and tuba, March 8, 1902; Helsinki, Finland; the timpani, strings August 2, 1936, Ravinia Festival. composer conducting Werner Janssen conducting APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME MOST RECENT 44 minutes CSO PERFORMANCES June 27, 2004, Ravinia Festival. Peter Oundjian conducting February 23, 24 & 26, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting 5 it is so profound—specific and evocative, yet also later music in general, perhaps, to see it that timeless and universal. way, but at the time—the time of Schoenberg’s The symphony was the most important genre luscious Transfigured Night, not Pierrot lunaire; for Sibelius’s musical thoughts at a time when the of Stravinsky’s academic E-flat symphony, not form didn’t seem to suit most . Strauss, The Rite of —it staked out new territory Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók, for example, to which Sibelius alone would return. The first all wrote symphonies of various kinds, but their movement, like much of his most characteristic pioneering work was done elsewhere. The one music, makes something whole and compelling contemporary of Sibelius whose symphonies are out of bits and pieces. As Sibelius would later played today, , took the symphony write: “It is as if the Almighty had thrown down to mean something quite different. Sibelius and the pieces of a mosaic for heaven’s floor and asked Mahler met in Helsinki in 1907, and their words me to put them together.” Heaven’s floor turns on the subject, often quoted, suggest that this out to be designed in a familiar , was the only time their paths would ever cross, but this isn’t readily apparent. (Commentators literally or figuratively. Sibelius always remem- seldom agree on the beginning of the second bered their encounter: theme, for example.) Certainly any symphony that begins in pieces can’t afford to dissect things When our conversation touched on the further in a traditional development section. In essence of symphony, I said that I admired fact, for Sibelius, development often implies the its severity and style and the profound logic first step in putting the music back together. that created an inner connection between all (Once, when asked about these technical matters, the motives. This was the experience I had Sibelius cunningly chose to speak about “a spiri- come to in composing. Mahler’s opinion was tual development” instead.) just the reverse. “Nein, die Symphonie müss There is true, sustained lyricism in the slow sein wie die Welt. Sie müss alles umfassen.” second movement, but that is not how it opens. (No, the symphony must be like the world. Sibelius begins with a timpani roll and restless It must embrace everything.) pizzicato strings from which a tune struggles to emerge. Melody eventually does Those lines have often been repeated to take wing, but what we remember most is the explain why Mahler’s symphonies sprawl and wonderful series of adventures encountered in sing, resembling no others ever written, but the process. they are just as useful in Sibelius’s point The scherzo is brief, hurried (except for a of view. By 1907, Sibelius had fixed his vision sorrowful woodwind theme inspired not by on symphonic music of increasing austerity; his Finland’s fate, as commentators used to insist, Third Symphony, completed that summer, marks but by the suicide of Sibelius’s sister-in-law), the turning point. That same summer, Mahler and expectant. When, after about five minutes, put the final touches on his Eighth Symphony, it leads straight into the broad first chords of scored for eight vocal soloists, chorus, boys’ , the finale, we realize that this is what we were and huge orchestra; taking as its text a medieval waiting for all along. From there the fourth hymn and the closing scene from Goethe’s Faust; movement unfolds slowly, continuously, and with and lasting nearly two hours—the work we know increasing power and majesty. It rises and soars as the Symphony of A Thousand. Five years earlier, in ways denied the earlier movements, and that, in 1902, the year Sibelius’s Second Symphony of course, is Sibelius’s way: heaven’s floor visible was first performed, Mahler had unveiled his at last. third, which lasts longer than Sibelius’s first two symphonies combined.

ibelius’s Second Symphony is a bold, unconventional work. We know too Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the S many of his later works, and too much Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987. 6 Sibelius’s Second Symphony and Chicago’s “Great Sadness”

During the Chicago Orchestra’s last full season at 1871—in this, the deadliest single-building fire in the Auditorium Theatre, Theodore U.S. history.* Thomas had programmed the U.S. premiere of “Had Mr. Thomas known some six weeks ago of the Sibelius’s Second Symphony for January 1 and 2, great sadness that was to rest like a pall over the city 1904, during the ninth subscription week. of Chicago on New Year’s Day he could scarcely have On November 23, 1903, the 1,600-seat Iroquois arranged a program better suited to the occasion Theatre (located on the north side of West Randolph than was that which he and the Chicago Orchestra Street, between State and Dearborn) opened its offered yesterday afternoon at the Auditorium,” doors with a production of Mr. Blue Beard starring wrote the critic in the Chicago Tribune on January 2, Eddie Foy. Barely a month later, the December 30 referring also to the Funeral March from Elgar’s matinee of the popular musical had a standing-room Grania and Diarmid as well as the Transformation audience of well over 2,000, mostly women and Scene and Glorification from Wagner’s Parsifal. children on holiday break. An additional 300 actors, “The new symphony of Sibelius—[no. 2] in D major, technicians, and stagehands were backstage. and which yesterday was played for the first time in America—proved a composition heavy with the mournful melancholy of the northern land whence its writer comes. . . . Mr. Thomas and his men threw themselves with exceptional enthusiasm and vigor into the performance of the new composition, which is of uncommon difficulty in many places, and the result was a rendition technically complete and interpretatively powerful.”

The Saturday evening concert on January 2 was canceled, as Mayor Carter Harrison had ordered all theaters closed for mandatory inspection. The Orchestra’s next concerts were given on January 15 and 16, since the Auditorium Theatre only needed minor modifications to meet the regulations. The January 2 concert was rescheduled for Monday, January 18, and Sibelius’s Symphony no. 2 received its second performance.

In spite of the , the trustees of the Orchestral Association continued with plans for the construc- tion of Orchestra Hall—ground was broken on May 1 and the hall opened on December 14, 1904. The Iroquois later reopened as the Colonial Theatre, Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1904 but in 1926 it was torn down to make way for the Oriental Theatre. Just after the beginning of the second act, sparks from a light set fire to a muslin curtain and began to spread to the fly space. Very quickly, Frank Villella is the director of the Rosenthal sections of burning curtains and set pieces began to Archives. For more information regarding the fall to the stage, and even though Foy attempted to Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s anniversary season, calm the audience, panic ensued. Patrons rushed to please visit cso.org/125moments. the exits—none of which were identified by illumi- nated signage and some were even hidden behind curtains—only to find that many opened inwardly or had been locked to prevent gatecrashers. *The tragedy at the Iroquois Theatre was a catalyst for the imple- Over 600 people lost their lives—more than twice mentation of increased safety standards and ordinances for public buildings, including clearly marked exits, doors of egress that as many casualties as the in open outward, and doors equipped with “crash” or “panic” bars.

© 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra 7