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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 Wednesday, January 7, 2015, at 6:30 (Afterwork Masterworks, performed without intermission) Vasily Petrenko Conductor Paul Lewis Piano Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor) Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support as a media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterworks series. Thursday, January 8, 2015, at 8:00 Friday, January 9, 2015, at 8:00 Saturday, January 10, 2015, at 8:00 Vasily Petrenko Conductor Paul Lewis Piano Elgar In the South (Alassio), Op. 50 Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor) Allegro Adagio un poco mosso— Rondo: Allegro PAUL LEWIS INTERMISSION Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 Non allegro Andante con moto (Tempo di valse) Lento assai—Allegro vivace This evening’s performance is generously sponsored by Margot and Josef Lakonishok. 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 Edward Elgar Born June 2, 1857, Broadheath, near Worcester, England. Died February 23, 1934, Worcester, England. In the South (Alassio), Op. 50 When Henry James to begin his first symphony. He failed on all three toured Italy in the 1870s, counts. Several days into their stay in Alassio, he encountered hordes of his wife Alice wrote in her diary, “Still cold & “grave English people grey & windy—E. and A. much depressed at who looked respectable these conditions & wondering if they will not and bored.” Three decades pack up & go home. E. feeling no inspiration for later, when Edward Elgar writing.” Edward himself wrote to his dear friend went to the Italian Alfred Jaeger (immortalized in the magnificent Riviera, craving sunshine and moving “Nimrod” music in the Enigma and relaxation, he Variations): “This visit has been, is, artistically a discovered the roads “full of English nursery complete failure & I can do nothing. The sym- maids and old English women and children.” He phony will not be written in this sunny (?) land.” quickly abandoned his first stop, in tourist- But the essence of Italian life affected Elgar, clogged Bordighera, just across the French despite the cold and the gales and swarms of border, finding it “lovely but too cockney for me,” mosquitoes as annoying as the tourist crowds. and moved on to Alassio, farther along the coast In Alassio, he began a concert overture, in place in the direction of Genoa. “This place is jolly,” he of the promised symphony, that is perhaps his wrote, “real Italian & no nursemaids calling out sunniest and most energized work. It depicts the ‘Now Master Johnny!’ ” Although Alassio did Italian holiday that largely eluded him, and it not provide the cloudless skies Elgar sought, he is music that Elgar never would have written at discovered the true Italy that has long intoxicated home in England, for even a dispiriting stay in travelers. “What matter the Mediterranean being Italy offered glimpses of life’s greatest pleasures. rough & grey? Who cares for gales? . We have In his manuscript, he wrote this passage from such meals! Such wine! Gosh! We are at last Tennyson’s The Daisy: living a life.” Elgar had gone to Italy in December 1903 not What hours were thine and mine to escape the damp and cold of an English winter, In lands of palm and southern pine but to regain his strength and inspiration after In lands of palm, of orange-blossom the exhausting work of finishing The Apostles and Of olive, aloe, and maise and vine COMPOSED MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE 1903–February 21, 1904 CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME January 20 & 21, 2011, Orchestra Hall. 17 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE Leonard Slatkin conducting March 16, 1904; London. The composer conducting INSTRUMENTATION three flutes and piccolo, two oboes FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES and english horn, two clarinets and November 4 & 5, 1904, Auditorium bass clarinet, two bassoons and con- Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting trabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, (U.S. premiere) three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, glockenspiel, two harps, strings 2 And from Byron’s Childe Harold: initial theme “Joy of Life (wine & macaroni),” but, in fact, it’s an idea he had sketched several . a land years before, depicting Dan, a friend’s bulldog, Which was the mightiest in its old command “triumphant (after a fight).” (Dan is officially And is the loveliest . memorialized in the eleventh of the Enigma Wherein were cast . Variations, when he falls into the river Wye, . the men of Rome! paddles upstream, and reaches the shore with a Thou art the garden of the world. victorious bark.) The rest of In the South, how- ever, leaves England far behind, beginning with Although Elgar called In the South a concert the reflective shepherd’s music that soon fol- overture, it’s really a tone poem—his largest lows, with, as the composer told Pitt, “romance orchestral movement at the time—of weighty creeping into the picture.” Elgar lingers in this dimensions and electric colors. Elgar may have relaxed and genial mood for some time until sidestepped that term to avoid comparison with the music moves into a forceful and determined the new tone poems by Richard Strauss (at the passage marked grandioso. There he writes two time of the premiere he asked that the program more lines from Tennyson into his manuscript: notes not mention Strauss’s name), for much about Elgar’s overture recalls the style, substance, What Roman strength Turbia show’d and sheer orchestral splendor of Strauss. These In ruin, by the mountain road two composers were kindred spirits in many ways, and their artistic outlooks were never more Here, and in the uncharacteristically dissonant closely aligned than in the early years of the pages that follow, Elgar recalls “the strife and twentieth century. When Strauss heard a perfor- wars, the ‘drums and tramplings’ of a later time.” mance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in 1902, This gives way to a delicate canto populare first he proposed a toast to “the first English progres- sung by the solo viola—an unidentified popular sivist, Meister Edward Elgar,” and remained song that Elgar eventually confessed he had Elgar’s friend for life. In the South begins with a written himself. He later turned this lovely music rapid unfurling of a large orchestral chord, very into a real song, taking words from a poem by like the opening of Strauss’s Don Juan (which Shelley, “An Ariette for Music” (he begins at Elgar admired), followed by the kind of dancing the line, “As the moon’s soft splendour”). With horns Strauss had already made famous. this little song—titled “In Moonlight”—Elgar returns to the shores of the Mediterranean, for he precise idea for In the South came to it was there, on the curving coast not far from Elgar during an afternoon stroll near Alassio, that Shelley spent the last months of Alassio. “I was by the side of an old his short life. When Henry James made his RomanT way. A peasant stood by an old ruin, pilgrimage to Shelley’s house, he wrote, “I can and in a flash it all came to me—the conflict of fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace armies in that very spot long ago, where now I of a warm evening and feeling very far from stood—the contrast of the ruin and the shep- England.” Elgar’s own final pages say the herd.” In a letter to Percy Pitt, who wrote the same thing, in music of warmly melodic and program note for the premiere, Elgar marked his life-loving exuberance. 3 Ludwig van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany. Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria. Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor) It’s hard for today’s Beethoven begins with a single majestic E-flat audiences to appreciate major chord from the full orchestra—one of the audacities of those sounds so commanding and individual Beethoven’s final piano that today, without hearing another note, we concerto, the one we call know what is sure to follow. The 1811 audience, the Emperor. For those of course, didn’t know what to expect, and they who are familiar not only surely wouldn’t have predicted the sudden, with this great work, but cadenza-like eruption from the soloist that with any of the later Beethoven gives them. Hearing from the soloist concertos that took their so early in a concerto is bold and unconventional, cues from Beethoven’s example, the grand piano but it’s not without precedent. Mozart tried it flourishes with which the score begins have little once, early in his career, and Beethoven himself shock value. Nor does the size and complexity of had begun his previous concerto—the fourth, the first movement trouble those who not only in G major—with the piano alone. But here have traveled its many paths before, but also have Beethoven isn’t striving for novelty; he’s prepar- come to accept the vast landscapes of Mahler. ing us for what lies ahead—a musical argument But to those who packed the Leipzig of unprecedented breadth and scale between two Gewandhaus in November 1811, this was new protagonists of equal stature. music, full of revelations and surprises. To begin Only after Beethoven commands our attention with, Beethoven wasn’t at the keyboard—this with three emphatic chords, each followed by was the only one of his five piano concertos that long-winded outbursts from the piano, does he didn’t personally introduce to the public.