Juanjo Mena Conductor Peter Serkin Piano Smetana the Moldau FROM
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SECOND 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 16, 2013, at 8:00 Saturday, May 18, 2013, at 8:00 Tuesday, May 21, 2013, at 7:30 Juanjo Mena Conductor Peter Serkin Piano Smetana The Moldau FROM Má vlast Takemitsu riverrun PETER SERKIN First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances Villa-Lobos Amazonas First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances INTERMISSION Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral) Awakening of Happy Feelings on Arriving in the Country: Allegro ma non troppo Scene by the Brook: Andante molto mosso Merry Gathering of Country Folk: Allegro— Thunderstorm: Allegro— Shepherd’s Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm: Allegretto This concert is part of the CSOA’s 2012–13 Rivers Festival, which is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The appearance of conductor Juanjo Mena is generously sponsored by Nuveen Investments. 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 GERARDPHILLIP HMUSCHERcB URNEY D ANIELPHILLI JAFFÉP HUSCHER Bed ˇrich Smetana Born March 2, 1824, Leitomischl, Bohemia. Died May 12, 1884, Prague, Czechoslovakia. The Moldau FROM My Country lthough his name came to conductor Johannes von Herbeck Asymbolize the Czech music that Czechs made good perform- spirit, Bedřich Smetana spent most ers but were not capable of writing of his early career outside his native significant music, Smetana was country. In 1860, however, after determined to create a national returning to Prague for a vacation, style of composition. Má vlast (My he wrote: “It is sad that I am forced country), a cycle of six orchestral to seek my living in foreign lands, tone poems, is the ultimate fruit far from my home which I love so of Smetana’s mission, testament to dearly and where I would so gladly his intense national pride and the live. My heart is heavy as I take brilliant success he achieved. “I am leave of these places. Be happy, my the creator of the Czech style in the homeland, which I love above all, dramatic as well as the symphonic my beautiful, my great, my only field,” he wrote in 1882, the year homeland . your soil is sacred to the complete My Country was me.” e following year, Smetana performed for the first time, and by moved to Prague for good. then few could argue with him. With e Bartered Bride, the In October 1874, just four weeks opera he began in 1862, Smetana after Smetana began concentrated revealed that his patriotic feelings work on the first tone poem in My went far beyond mere homesick- Country, he went completely deaf ness. Still incensed by the offhand (he had begun to have trouble with remark made by the second-rate his hearing that summer). Like COMPOSED MOST RECENT CSO APPROXIMATE November–December 1874 PERFORMANCE PERFORMANCE TIME April 15, 2006, Orchestra 11 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE Hall. Paavo Järvi conducting April 4, 1875, Prague CSO RECORDINGS INSTRUMENTATION 1952. Rafael Kubelík FIRST CSO two flutes and piccolo, two conducting. Mercury PERFORMANCE oboes, two clarinets, two 1977. Daniel January 13, 1894, Auditorium bassoons, four horns, two Barenboim conducting. Theatre. Theodore trumpets, three trombones Deutsche Grammophon Thomas conducting and tuba, timpani, tri- angle, cymbals, bass drum, harp, strings 2 Beethoven before him, he now which intertwine and increase and wrote music constantly, almost later grow and swell into a mighty defiantly. In November 1877, he melodic stream.” Later Smetana remarked that “in these three years explained how that idea blossomed of deafness I have completed more into a detailed, full-color portrait of music than I had otherwise done in the Moldau: ten.” e bounty included the first four parts of My Country, an opera, e composition depicts the and the string quartet he called course of the river, from its From My Life—a chilling personal beginning where two brooks, record of his difficulties. one cold, the other warm, join a stream, running through he second tone poem of My forests and meadows and a TCountry, Vltava (e Moldau), lovely countryside where merry has always been the most popular feasts are celebrated; water- of the six pieces, and it is one sprites dance in the moonlight; of music’s greatest landscape on nearby rocks can be seen paintings. Smetana’s friend, the the outline of ruined castles, conductor Mori Anger, said the proudly soaring into the sky. music came to the composer one Vltava swirls through the Saint day when the two of them went John Rapids and flows in a out into the countryside, looking broad stream toward Prague. It for the spot where two rivers join passes Vyšehrad and disappears together: “within him sounded majestically into the distance, the first chords of the two motifs where it joins the Labe. 3 Toru¯ Takemitsu Born October 8, 1930, Tokyo, Japan. Died February 20, 1996, Tokyo, Japan. riverrun akemitsu decided to become a Ultimately, in a way that gave his Tcomposer at the age of six- output its distinctive sensibility, he teen, while listening to music on explored both Western innovation the radio as he recuperated from and Japanese tradition at the same pneumonia. He began to study time. Takemitsu was one of the scores and to teach himself to play first important composers to bridge the piano. At eighteen, he sought the musical worlds of the East and out Yusuji Koyose as his teacher; the West. He was inspired by the although he studied with him on complex relationship between the and off for a while, Takemitsu two—their similarities as well as remained largely self-taught. (His differences. e assimilation wasn’t main source of education, he once always easy. (He once remarked, said, is “this daily life, including all for example, that it’s very difficult of music and nature.”) Significantly, for Japanese composers to write Takemitsu first studied Western, fast music.) not traditional Japanese, music. Takemitsu had a broader (“During the war in Japan, listen- understanding of music than most ing to Western music was forbid- composers because he learned our den,” he recalled. “And so, when music as a foreigner, and he studied the war was over, we young people his own country’s music as someone were thirsty for [it].”) It was another who knew Western music first. decade before Takemitsu became He also walked the mountains of aware of the music of his own land. Indonesia, stopping in the villages COMPOSED FIRST CSO INSTRUMENTATION 1984 PERFORMANCE solo piano, three flutes, July 14, 1985, Ravinia piccolo and alto flute, three FIRST PERFORMANCE Festival. Peter Serkin, piano; oboes and english horn, four January 10, 1985, Los Seiji Ozawa conducting clarinets, E-flat clarinet and Angeles. Peter Serkin, piano; contrabass clarinet, three Simon Rattle conducting MOST RECENT CSO bassoons and contrabas- PERFORMANCE soon, four horns, three These are the first July 17, 1988, Ravinia trumpets, three trombones, Chicago Symphony Festival. Peter Serkin, timpani [?], percussion, two Orchestra subscription piano; Christoph harps, celesta, strings concert performances Eschenbach conducting APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 14 minutes 4 to listen to their music. He once continually rushing past led him spent a few days on a small, remote to think of sound as a continuum, Australian island with a group of like flowing water. He began bushmen (Takemitsu was the first to compose with that in mind, Japanese person to visit the island) starting with Water Music in 1960, and found music unlike any we later saying that he wanted to write know. Song and dance among the a series of pieces in which their aborigines aren’t separate from essential materials “pass through human experience, and he found various metamorphoses, culminat- it difficult to draw a distinction ing in a sea of tonality.” Takemitsu between what was music and what became interested in mutability and was life—the bushmen didn’t even process—he said, for example, that have a special word for “music.” In his percussion work, Seasons, is not 1967, working on a commission about the four seasons themselves, from the New York Philharmonic, but the changes between them. Takemitsu attempted to write for symphony orchestra and tradi- akemitsu became fascinated tional Japanese instruments for the Tby Finnegan’s Wake in the early first time. at work—November 1970s, sensing the continuity Steps—forced him to accept differ- between ences so profound that they were, his own as he remarked, beyond words. In develop- his fusion of these traditions and ing ideas cultures, Takemitsu anticipated about what he envisioned as our future: music and “Indeed, I believe that, in time, James diverse cultures born of diverse Joyce’s peoples will be merged into one fluid synthesis, that human beings will language come to have one culture, immense and the and on a global scale.” novel’s treatment akemitsu grouped many of of life, James Joyce, author of Finnegan’s Wake This works into series based on dreams, themes from literature or nature— and the trees, constellations, gardens, rain. passage of e underlying idea of all the time. A water-based compositions is one number of pieces written under the of endless flow—rain falling into spell of Finnegan’s Wake took Joyce’s rivers, which in turn empty into words as their titles: Far calls, coming the ocean, creating what Takemitsu far! for violin and orchestra in 1980; called “a sea of tonality.” e A Way a Lone for string quartet in image first came to the composer 1981; and riverrun for piano and as he was riding a subway train in orchestra in 1984.