Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
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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, December 4, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, December 5, 2014, at 1:30 Saturday, December 6, 2014, at 8:00 Tuesday, December 9, 2014, at 7:30 Ingo Metzmacher Conductor Tchaikovsky Selections from The Nutcracker, Op. 71 Miniature Overture March Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy Russian Dance Stravinsky Petrushka The Shrovetide Fair In Petrushka’s Room The Moor’s Room The Grand Carnival INTERMISSION Shostakovich Symphony No. 11, Op. 103 (The Year 1905) The Palace Square: Adagio The Ninth of January: Allegro Eternal Memory: Adagio The Alarm: Allegro non troppo—Allegro Saturday’s concert is sponsored by S&C Electric Company. 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 and Gerard McBurney Pyotr Tchaikovsky Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 18, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Selections from The Nutcracker Although The Nutcracker when a fellow passenger on the ship threw is the work that intro- himself overboard and he was asked to translate duces Tchaikovsky to the suicide note—but he put on his best public many music lovers, the face, ready to conquer a new world. composer didn’t have high Tchaikovsky was amazed to discover how hopes for its future. He famous he was in the U.S. “It seems that in complained in particular America I am better known than in Europe,” he that the story, based on quipped. By 1891, he had already composed most E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The of the works on which his fame rests. He had Nutcracker and the recently completed his fifth symphony, which Mouse King” (simplified by Alexander Dumas had been introduced to this country in New York and further watered down by the choreographer City two years earlier by Theodore Thomas, who Marius Petipa), lacked the compelling drama of would launch the Chicago Symphony Orchestra his two previous big ballets, Swan Lake and The the next October. In the U.S. that spring, Sleeping Beauty. After Petipa handed him a Tchaikovsky conducted concerts of his music in synopsis, annotated with measure-by-measure New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; made musical suggestions, Tchaikovsky was stunned. quick tours to the nation’s capital and Niagara “I am experiencing a crisis,” he said at the time. Falls (like Mahler a few years later); and was He was so reluctant to undertake the project that, genuinely impressed by the “frankness, sincerity, when he was invited to the United States in the and generosity of this country.” But when he spring of 1891 to conduct his music at the gala returned home he was depressed, irritable, and opening of Carnegie Hall, he accepted with unable to make satisfactory headway on The enthusiasm—procrastination on a global scale. Nutcracker. “The ballet is infinitely worse than As he was passing through Paris on the way to Sleeping Beauty, that much is certain,” he wrote to the U.S., Tchaikovsky picked up a newspaper, his nephew. turned to the back page, and learned of the death Although he continued to complain that of his sister Sasha. He arrived in America broken his brain was “empty,” Tchaikovsky eventually and despairing—his mood was further darkened warmed to the project. In the end, he wrote COMPOSED MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE 1891–92 CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME July 12, 2009, Ravinia Festival. James 10 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE Conlon conducting Suite: March 19, 1892; Saint Petersburg, CSO RECORDINGS November 23, 24 & 25, 2012, Orchestra Russia. The composer conducting 1939. Frederick Stock conducting. Hall. Ludwig Wicki conducting Columbia Ballet: December 18, 1892; Saint Petersburg, Russia INSTRUMENTATION 1959. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA three flutes and piccolo, two oboes 1966. Morton Gould conducting. RCA FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES and english horn, two clarinets and October 22, 1892, Auditorium Theatre. bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, 1986. Sir Georg Solti conducting. Theodore Thomas conducting two trumpets, two cornets and piccolo London (U.S. premiere) trumpet, three trombones, tuba, 1991. Claudio Abbado conducting. timpani, percussion, celesta, strings July 23, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Isaac Sony Van Grove conducting 2 some of his finest and most inspired music, Thomas gave the U.S. premiere of the suite with finishing the score so far ahead of deadline that the Chicago Orchestra on October 22, 1892, in he prepared a concert suite of excerpts, which the Auditorium Theatre, early in the Orchestra’s he conducted nine months before the ballet was second season—among the first in a long line of staged. In this truncated form, The Nutcracker premieres the CSO has given over the years. became one of his most enduring works. (“For “These pieces are miniature pictures painted a lot of people, Tchaikovsky is The Nutcracker, with infinite grace and care,” begins the program but not the ballet in full, only the suite from it,” note for the 1892 Chicago performances. This wrote George Balanchine, one of the greatest week’s concerts include four of the best-known men to be associated with the ballet, first as a selections from the suite Thomas introduced dancer and later as choreographer.) Theodore here: the miniature overture (so named because it lacks a genuine development section); a march, which unfolds as a courtly dialogue between winds and strings; the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (with its signature solo role for the recently invented celesta, which Tchaikovsky had discovered in Paris, where he was seduced by its “divinely beautiful tone”); and the dazzling Russian Dance (the Ukranian folk dance known as the trepak), which Chicago’s 1892 program writer dismissed as “inspiration for the toes, not food for the brain.” A first edition score, printed by P. Jurgenson in Moscow, of a suite from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (or Casse-noisette in French) from the Theodore Thomas Collection in the CSO’s Rosenthal Archives. The title page bears an inscription to Thomas from the summer of 1892, a few months before the first performance in October of that year, inaugurating the Orchestra’s second season. This score bears markings—by CSO music directors Thomas, Frederick Stock, and Fritz Reiner—and likely would have been used for the recordings led by Stock in 1939 for Columbia and Reiner in 1959 for RCA. 3 Igor Stravinsky Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia. Died April 6, 1971, New York City. Petrushka (1911 version) The Firebird was by visual imagery.) At first he thought of it as Stravinsky’s first big hit, a symphony, but when he played parts of it at and it made him famous, the piano for Diaghilev early that summer, the almost literally overnight, impresario immediately knew that this was music at the age of twenty-eight. for dance. With Diaghilev’s urging, Stravinsky Petrushka is that most continued working on the score that would difficult of artistic eventually become their biggest sensation, Le creations—the follow-up. sacre du printemps—The Rite of Spring. But in the The Firebird had not only meantime, Stravinsky got sidetracked. made Stravinsky the talk When Diaghilev went to visit Stravinsky in of Paris, then the capital of the international art Switzerland at the end of the summer, he was world—capturing the attention of the city’s stunned to discover that the composer had biggest names, including Debussy and Proust— begun a completely different work instead. but it had scored a huge success for Sergei As Stravinsky recalled, Diaghilev “was much Diaghilev, who had taken a risk hiring the young, astonished when, instead of the sketches of the relatively unknown composer to write music for Sacre, I played him the piece which I had just the Russian Ballet’s 1910 season. Naturally, both composed and which later became the second men wanted another sensation for the next year. scene of Petrushka.” Stravinsky already had an idea. While he was For the second time that year, one of finishing the orchestration of The Firebird, he had Stravinsky’s landmark ballet scores started out dreamed about “a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, not as music to be danced, but as an unnamed seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance abstract symphonic score. But unlike The Rite herself to death. They were sacrificing her to pro- of Spring, Petrushka moved from sketch to stage pitiate the god of spring.” These powerful images without serious interruption. What had begun as suggested music to Stravinsky and he began to just a detour from The Rite now became the main sketch almost at once. (Early in his career, most project of the year, and, at the same time, the of Stravinsky’s initial musical ideas were inspired score with which Stravinsky found his modernist COMPOSED March 24, 25 & 26, 2011, Orchestra tambourine, side drum, tam-tam, August 1910–May 26, 1911 Hall. Charles Dutoit conducting xylophone, piano, celesta, two (complete ballet) harps, strings FIRST PERFORMANCE June 13, 1911; Paris, France CSO PERFORMANCES, APPROXIMATE THE COMPOSER CONDUCTING PERFORMANCE TIME FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES Between 1935 and 1964, Stravinsky 35 minutes November 21 & 22, 1930, Orchestra conducted the CSO in selections from Hall. Frederick Stock conducting (suite) Petrushka on thirteen occasions at CSO RECORDINGS Orchestra Hall, the Pabst Theatre in 1969. Carlo Maria Giulini conducting. July 24, 1954, Ravinia Festival. Pierre Milwaukee, and at the Ravinia Festival. Angel (suite) Monteux conducting (complete ballet) 1977. James Levine conducting. RCA January 5 & 6, 1961, Orchestra INSTRUMENTATION (complete ballet) Hall.