Season 202010101010----20202020111111

The

FriFriFriday,Fri day, October 11,, at 777:007:00:00:00

Beyond the Score ®®®: Is Music Dangerous?

Charles Dutoit Conductor Gerard McBurney Host David Howey Actor

A multimulti----mediamedia exploration of Shostakovich’s No. 4

Intermission

ShosShostakovichtakovich Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43 I. Allegretto poco moderato—Presto II. Moderato con moto III. Largo—Allegro

This program runs approximately 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Beyond the Score® is made possible by support from the Hirschberg-Goodfriend Fund in memory of Adolf Hirschberg as established by Juliet J. Goodfriend and by the Wachovia Wells Fargo Foundation. Additional funding comes from the Annenberg Foundation, the Council on the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.

Beyond the Score® is produced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Gerard McBurney, Creative Director, Beyond the Score Martha Gilmer, Executive Producer, Beyond the Score Cameron Arens, Stage Manager

Acknowledgments David King Collection Footage Farm Ltd. Kaleidoscope Images

In the 2010-11 season The celebrates its 30-year artistic collaboration with , who made his debut with that ensemble in 1980, and who has held the title of chief conductor since 2008. With the 2012-13 season, the Orchestra will honor Mr. Dutoit by bestowing upon him the title of conductor laureate. Also artistic director and principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic, Mr. Dutoit regularly collaborates with the world’s pre-eminent and soloists. He has recorded extensively for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips, CBS, and Erato, and his more than 200 recordings have garnered over 40 awards and distinctions.

From 1977 to 2002, Mr. Dutoit was artistic director of the Montreal Symphony. Between 1990 and 2010 he was artistic director and principal conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra's summer festival at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and from 1991 to 2001 he was music director of the Orchestre National de France. In 1996 he was appointed music director of Tokyo’s NHK Symphony; today he is music director emeritus. Mr. Dutoit has been artistic director of both the Sapporo Pacific Music Festival and the Miyazaki International Music Festival in Japan, as well as the Canton International Summer Music Academy in Guangzhou, , which he founded in 2005. In 2009 he became music director of the Verbier Festival Orchestra. While still in his early 20s, Mr. Dutoit was invited by to conduct the State Opera. Mr. Dutoit has since conducted at Covent Garden, the , the Deutsche Oper , and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.

In 1991 Mr. Dutoit was made an Honorary Citizen of the City of Philadelphia. In 1995 he was named Grand Officier de l'Ordre National du Québec, and in 1996 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France. In 1998 he was invested as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest award of merit.

Mr. Dutoit was born in Lausanne, , and his extensive musical training included , viola, piano, percussion, music history, and composition in Geneva, Siena, Venice, and Boston. A globetrotter motivated by his passion for history and archaeology, political science, art, and architecture, Mr. Dutoit has traveled all the nations of the world.

A native of England, Gerard McBurney studied in Cambridge and at the Moscow Conservatory before returning to London, where he worked for many years as a composer, arranger, broadcaster, teacher, and writer. He is artistic programming advisor for the Chicago Symphony and creative director of Beyond the Score.

Mr. McBurney’s original compositions include orchestral works, a ballet, a chamber opera, songs, and chamber music, as well as many theater scores. He also is well known for his reconstructions of various lost and forgotten works by .

As a scholar Mr. McBurney has published mostly in the field of Russian and Soviet music. His journalistic work includes articles on many different musical subjects. For 20 years he created and presented hundreds of programs on BBC Radio 3, as well as occasional programs for other radio stations in the U.K., Europe, and the former . He has also written, researched, and presented more than two dozen documentary films for British and German television channels.

For many years Mr. McBurney lectured and taught, first at the London College of Music and then for more than 10 years at the Royal Academy of Music. He has also acted as advisor and collaborated with many orchestras and presenters, including Lincoln Center, the Emerson String Quartet, and the . Mr. McBurney joined the staff of the Chicago Symphony in September 2006 and made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut last season.

David Howey is head of the Acting Program at the Brind School of Theatre at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He was an actor in England for 30 years, appearing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre Company, in London’s West End, and in numerous TV series and films. He has appeared on Broadway twice and performed Shakespeare across the , including the title role in Macbeth at the Annenberg Center, Prospero in The Tempest at Arcadia University, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale for the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival.

Mr. Howey has performed with the Walnut Street Theatre, Bristol Riverside, 1812 Productions, Interact, the Arden Theatre Company, and the Wilma Theater. He made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 2002 as the Colonel in Tom Stoppard and André Previn’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, a collaboration between the Orchestra and the Wilma Theater.

BEYOND THE SCORE ®

Begun in 2005, the Chicago Symphony’s Beyond the Score seeks to open the door to the symphonic repertoire for first-time concertgoers as well as to encourage an active, more fulfilling way of listening for seasoned audiences. The lifeblood of Beyond the Score is its firm rooting in the live tradition: musical extracts, spoken clarification, theatrical narrative, and hand-paced projections on a large central screen are performed in close synchrony—an arresting and innovative approach that illuminates classical music more idiomatically than other methods (program notes, pre-concert lectures, filmed documentary, etc.). After each 60-minute program focusing on a single masterwork, audiences return from intermission to experience the piece performed in a regular concert setting, equipped with a new understanding of its style and genesis.

This format’s potential was quickly recognized by orchestras in the United States and abroad; a rapidly expanding licensing program has since brought Beyond the Score to audiences throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and Holland, presented by organizations of many sizes. Recognizing that a large population is economically or geographically unable to attend these performances in person, the Chicago Symphony also offers digital video downloads of selects programs from its website at www.beyondthescore.org.

In September 2008, the Chicago Symphony released Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, led by its principal conductor, , on its CSO Resound label. Accompanying this Grammy Award-winning recording of the Symphony is a free bonus DVD video of the Beyond the Score production examining Shostakovich’s controversial and powerful work— the first commercially released video from this acclaimed concert series.

IS MUSIC DANGEROUS?

Shostakovich composed his Fourth Symphony in the Soviet Union under the dark shadow of Stalin. Rehearsals began in earnest, but the work was withdrawn before the premiere and it was not performed for 25 years. What about this work did the Soviet government find dangerous? Or was it Shostakovich himself who withdrew it because he feared for his life?

It’s often the case that great art can emerge only through great suffering. In Shostakovich’s Soviet Union, darkened by the shadow of Stalin, music was essential—it expressed the ideas and feelings of a people that otherwise had no voice. Perhaps this is why the Fourth Symphony lay dormant, unperformed, for 25 years after its completion.

Parallel Events 1936 Shostakovich Symphony No. 4 Music Barber Symphony No. 1 Literature Auden On This Island Art Mondrian Composition in Red and Blue History Spanish Civil War begins

SSSymphonySymphony No. 4

Dmitri Shostakovich Born iiinin St. Petersburg, September 25, 1906 DiDiDiedDi ed iiinin Moscow, August 9, 1975

“This game could end badly.” No artist likes getting a bad review, but in January 1936, when Dmitri Shostakovich read those words at the end of an article attacking his popular and acclaimed opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, he realized he was dealing with more than mere aesthetic criticism. This amounted to an official warning that he had to take deadly seriously. The article was entitled “” and appeared in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party. Although unsigned, the composer knew that Stalin had walked out of a performance of Lady Macbeth a few days earlier and he immediately understood that this attack was written at Stalin’s behest and perhaps even with his direct participation.

Criticism in Dangerous Times For the brilliant 29-year-old composer, whose fame had risen steadily over the previous decade, the Pravda article, which was soon followed by another one criticizing his ballet The Limpid Stream, was a bitter personal and professional blow. The horrors of the Stalinist era were becoming ever more evident and such matters were literally ones of life and death. Associates, friends, and family of Shostakovich disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances. As the fate of such prominent writers as Maxim Gorky, Osip Mandelstam, Isaak Babel, and the brilliant theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold would make clear, no one, no matter how celebrated, was safe.

Despite financial hardships in his youth, Shostakovich’s career to this point had seemed charmed. Prodigiously talented as a pianist and composer, he had come to international attention in his late teens with his graduation project from the Leningrad Conservatory: the First Symphony. Premiered when he was 19, it made Shostakovich famous overnight and extended his renown far beyond the Soviet Union as , Wilhelm Furtwängler, , and other leading conductors championed the youthful work. ( gave the American premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1928.) His next two followed soon thereafter.

Throughout his career Shostakovich was intimately involved with music for the screen and stage. He wrote his modernist first opera, , in 1927-28 and completed Lady Macbeth four years later. The great popular success of the latter in the Soviet Union, as well as abroad, led to a new production in December 1935, which sparked the Pravda rebuke. At that time Shostakovich was halfway through composing a symphony, his first in some six years, a work that had been long in the planning. After various false starts, Shostakovich had finished the first two movements by the beginning of January, some three weeks before Stalin attended the fateful Lady Macbeth performance.

The sustained criticism in the press and elsewhere that followed had the practical consequence of curbing presentations of his works and of his own chances to perform, therefore cutting off much of his income exactly at a time that he was expecting his first child. Immersion in composition proved his salvation—as he informed his friend Isaak Glikman: “Even if they chop my hands off, I will still continue to compose music, albeit I have to hold the pen in my teeth.”

An Aborted Premiere Shostakovich finished the Fourth Symphony—his longest to date and orchestrally the largest he ever composed—in April and by the end of the year conductor Fritz Stiedry was rehearsing the Leningrad Philharmonic in preparation for the scheduled premiere on December 11. The concert never took place. A press announcement appeared that day stating the composer had withdrawn the work “from performance on the grounds that it in no way corresponds to his current creative convictions and represents for him an outdated phase.”

The real reasons for the cancellation are still not entirely clear. Some have questioned the competence of the conductor, stating that poor rehearsals discouraged Shostakovich. By other accounts the composer was approached by officials who requested that he withdraw the score. Given all the attacks against him, his precarious situation, and the recent birth of his daughter, Shostakovich certainly had every reason to be cautious. In any case, the Fourth was not heard in public, although it enjoyed some underground reputation through keyboard arrangements that allowed intimates to get to know it. The existence of the work was too widely acknowledged for Shostakovich to bury it completely and so when he wrote his next symphony—the famous Fifth—it bore the appropriate number. That symphony, which remains his most often performed, rehabilitated him.

The Fourth Symphony was finally premiered 25 years later, on December 30, 1961, with Kirill Kondrashin leading the Moscow Philharmonic to resounding applause. By this time Shostakovich had written 12 of his 15 symphonies and allegedly told Glikman, “It seems to me that in many respects the Fourth is better than my most recent symphonies.” The work was soon taken up abroad, with leading the Philadelphians in the American premiere in 1963.

A Closer Look The Fourth Symphony is certainly different from Shostakovich’s earlier ones and no doubt would have sparked considerable controversy if it had been performed in 1936. Surely the length and massive size of the Fourth, as biographer Laurel Fay has noted, “would have been construed as the epitome of formalism, an act of arrogant defiance of the Party’s benevolent guidance.” After the brash and brilliant First Symphony, and the more problematic Second and Third, this was the symphony in which Shostakovich both pointed to his maturity but also hinted at directions he did not take or only did so more privately. The most potent influence on the piece is Mahler, whose works were becoming ever more important to the composer at this time. His closest friend, the brilliant musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, had recently written a book on Mahler and the two pursued deep study of his music.

The work is in three movements, two long outer ones lasting nearly a half hour each frame a much shorter central one. The first movement (AllegAllegrettoretto poco moderatomoderato) immediately announces the boldness and intensity that characterize much of the work. Some aspects of its musical language, such as the use of fugal and ostinato techniques, recall instrumental sections of Lady Macbeth. The brief Moderato con moto serves as a sort of intermezzo, in this case one calling upon dance, like Mahler’s use of Ländler.

The finale is in two sections, beginning with a funereal LargoLargo,,,, also reminiscent of Mahler, which leads to an Allegro filled with more dances and marches, often of a grotesque character. The conclusion of the Symphony is one of the most remarkable of any in the repertory. In the final minutes the evocative orchestration, using celesta, and the gradual building of dissonance is quiet, tragic, and haunting. It surely would have proved dangerous at the time.

Shostakovich’s next symphony, the popular Fifth with its perhaps exaggerated affirmations at the end, was more what the authorities wanted. He later made a remark to the conductor Boris Khaikin: “I finished the [Fifth] Symphony fortissimo and in the major. Everyone is saying that it is an optimistic and life-affirming symphony. I wonder, what would they be saying if I had finished it pianissimo and in minor?” That is what he had in fact done in the Fourth, although few knew it at the time.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

The Fourth Symphony was composed from 1935 to 1936.

Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra gave the United States premiere of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony in February 1963, one of many American premieres the Orchestra has given of the composer’s works. The most recent performances were in March 2007, with Ingo Metzmacher .

The Orchestra recorded the Symphony in 1963 with Ormandy for CBS and in 1994 with Myung Whun Chung for Deutsche Grammophon.

The work is scored for four flutes, two piccolos, four oboes (IV doubling English horn), four clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, eight horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, two timpanists, percussion (bass drum, castanets, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, triangle, wood block, xylophone), two harps, celesta, and strings.

Performance time is approximately 60 minutes.

Program note © 2010. All rights reserved. Program note may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.

GENERAL TERMS Cadence: The conclusion to a phrase, movement, or piece based on a recognizable melodic formula, harmonic progression, or dissonance resolution Chord: The simultaneous sounding of three or more tones Chromatic: Relating to tones foreign to a given key (scale) or chord Coda: A concluding section or passage added in order to confirm the impression of finality Development: See sonata form Dissonance: A combination of two or more tones requiring resolution Fugue: A piece of music in which a short melody is stated by one voice and then imitated by the other voices in succession, reappearing throughout the entire piece in all the voices at different places Intermezzo: A short movement connecting the main divisions of a symphony Ländler: A dance similar to a slow waltz Legato: Smooth, even, without any break between notes Minuet: A dance in triple time commonly used up to the beginning of the 19th century as the lightest movement of a symphony Modulate: To pass from one key or mode into another Op.: Abbreviation for opus, a term used to indicate the chronological position of a composition within a composer’s output. Opus numbers are not always reliable because they are often applied in the order of publication rather than composition. Ostinato: A steady bass accompaniment, repeated over and over Recapitulation: See sonata form Rondo: A form frequently used in symphonies and concertos for the final movement. It consists of a main section that alternates with a variety of contrasting sections (A-B-A-C-A etc.). Scherzo: Literally “a joke.” Usually the third movement of symphonies and quartets that was introduced by Beethoven to replace the minuet. The scherzo is followed by a gentler section called a trio, after which the scherzo is repeated. Its characteristics are a rapid tempo in triple time, vigorous rhythm, and humorous contrasts. Sonata form: The form in which the first movements (and sometimes others) of symphonies are usually cast. The sections are exposition, development, and recapitulation, the last sometimes followed by a coda. The exposition is the introduction of the musical ideas, which are then “developed.” In the recapitulation, the exposition is repeated with modifications.

THE SPEED OF MUSIC (Tempo) Adagio: Leisurely, slow Allegretto: A tempo between walking speed and fast Allegro: Bright, fast Con moto: With motion Largo: Broad MaMaMarcato:Ma rcato: Accented, stressed Moderato: A moderate tempo, neither fast nor slow Presto: Very fast

TEMPO MODIFIERS Poco: Little, a bit

DYNAMIC MARKS Fortissimo (ff): Very loud Pianissimo (pp): Very soft