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, March 12, 2015, at 8:00 Saturday, March 14, 2015, at 8:00 Tuesday, March 17, 2015, at 7:30 Charles Dutoit Conductor Louis Lortie Piano Ravel Rapsodie espagnole Prélude à la nuit Malagueña Habanera Feria D’Indy Symphony on a French Mountain Air, Op. 25 Azzez lent—Modérément animé Assez modéré, mais sans lenteur Animé LOUIS LORTIE INTERMISSION Franck Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra LOUIS LORTIE Ravel Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloe Dawn— Pantomime— General Dance These performances are made possible in part by a generous gift from the Arthur Maling Trust. CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT and RedEye for their generous support as media sponsors of the Classic Encounter series. 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 Daniel Jaffé Maurice Ravel Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France. Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France. Rapsodie espagnole Maurice Ravel was born borrow the score, and his La soirée dans Grenade in the French Pyrenees, (Night in Grenada), written five years later, sug- only a few miles from the gests that he studied it carefully. (The suspicious Spanish border, a geo- similarity of the two pieces contributed to the graphical boundary he eventual falling out between the composers.) often crossed in his music. Even though his family apsodie espagnole, the only work Ravel moved to Paris while he originally conceived as a concert was still a baby, Ravel piece for orchestra, is his first Spanish came by his fascination music to take advantage of his incomparable with Spain naturally, for his mother was Basque Rear for orchestral color. In 1907, Ravel set out and grew up in Madrid. (His Swiss father to write his first opera and his first orchestral inspired in his son a love for things precise and score. Both works were Spanish in flavor, and, mechanical that carried over into his impeccable although the opera, L’heure espagnole, would music.) Rapsodie espagnole is among his best- take two more years to finish, most of Rapsodie known evocations of the Spain he visited so espagnole was written quickly, as a set of four seldom yet seemed to know so well. (Most of Spanish sketches, incorporating the 1895 Ravel’s Spanish music was written before he had habanera as the third, now in full Technicolor. spent much time in that country, just as his La The first movement, Prelude à la nuit (Prelude valse predates his first visit to Vienna.) to the night), is all atmosphere over a slow, soft, One of Ravel’s earliest pieces—written just but persistent descending ostinato: F, E, D, after he left the Paris Conservatory in 1895—was C-sharp. Malagueña is based on a type of fan- a habanera for two pianos, the first indication dango danced in Malaga, in southern Spain. The that he would join that group of French compos- Habanera is a slow Cuban dance in duple meter ers, which includes Bizet, Lalo, and Chabrier, (with the characteristic tum, ta-tum-tum rhythm) who have written some of our best Spanish that Bizet imported to Seville for Carmen. It has music. The habanera was Ravel’s first music to be been suggested that Ravel’s Habanera, virtually performed publicly, in March 1898, and, despite identical with the 1895 two-piano music, is based the two pianists’ inability to stay together, it on a song his mother taught him. The final Feria made a strong impression on Claude Debussy, is a brilliant festival, complete with castanets. who was in the audience. Debussy asked to —Phillip Huscher COMPOSED MOST RECENT tuba, timpani, bass drum, side drum, 1907 CSO PERFORMANCES cymbals, triangle, tambourine, May 31, June 1, 2 & 5, 2012, Orchestra castanets, tam-tam, xylophone, two FIRST PERFORMANCE Hall. Ludovic Morlot conducting harps, celesta, strings March 15, 1908; Paris, France August 7, 2013, Ravinia Festival. Carlos APPROXIMATE FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES Miguel Prieto conducting PERFORMANCE TIME November 12 & 13, 1909, Orchestra 16 minutes Hall. Frederick Stock conducting INSTRUMENTATION two flutes and two piccolos, two July 1, 1944, Ravinia Festival. Pierre CSO RECORDINGS oboes and english horn, two clarinets Monteux conducting 1956. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA and bass clarinet, three bassoons 1968. Jean Martinon conducting. RCA and sarrusophone (traditionally played by contrabassoon), four horns, 1991. Daniel Barenboim conducting. three trumpets, three trombones, Erato 2 Vincent d’Indy Born March 27, 1851, Paris, France. Died December 2, 1931, Paris, France. Symphony on a French Mountain Air, Op. 25 Vincent d’Indy was part considered early music: he presented the first of the late-nineteenth modern performances of Monteverdi’s operas century circle of Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea, and of Paris-based composers Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, Castor et Pollux, and headed by César Dardanus, as well as championing works by Bach Franck—including and Gluck. Duparc, Chausson, and Though a leading composer of his generation, Chabrier—which with at least two major operas to his credit, unexpectedly became the two very fine string quartets, and a deal of precursor of Les six. piano music, d’Indy’s reputation in that field While Chabrier, for instance, was greatly was eclipsed not long after the end of his life admired and emulated by Francis Poulenc, in 1931. Possibly this was due to his right-wing d’Indy, more directly, was a forebear of Arthur and, in particular, his anti-Semitic views; these Honegger: not only was he Honegger’s teacher, did not affect his professional relations with but he also shared with his Swiss pupil both a Jewish colleagues—he held Paul Dukas in high sober sense of duty to his art and a certain regard, who in turn hailed d’Indy as “one of the religious devotion. D’Indy also passed to his greatest French musicians”—yet, by the 1940s, pupils a masterful inventiveness in writing for the they were sufficient grounds for many, including orchestra—having himself learned his craft by Pierre Boulez, to reject his work out of hand. playing timpani and horn in various orchestras. Just twenty years after d’Indy’s death, the French Other d’Indy pupils associated with Les six music specialist Edward Lockspeiser noted that included Georges Auric, whose irreverence was only three of his works were at all known even in quite contrary to his teacher’s sensibility, though d’Indy’s own country: a set of orchestral varia- d’Indy was widely recognized for nurturing the tions, Istar; the symphonic poem Jour d’été à la compositional talent of pupils even contrary to montagne; and his earliest masterpiece, now being his own style; and Erik Satie, the “godfather” of performed at this concert, the Symphonie sur un Les six. chant montagnard français. The latter two pupils studied under d’Indy The Symphony on a French Mountain Air was at the Schola Cantorum, France’s major composed in 1886, ten years after d’Indy had alternative center of higher music education attended the premiere of Wagner’s Ring cycle established by d’Indy in 1894 to rival the Paris at the opening festival of Bayreuth—d’Indy Conservatory. D’Indy’s activities as composer becoming thereafter a devotee of Wagner’s and teacher were complemented by his work as a work and aesthetic theories—and about eight scholar, researching and editing what was then years before he founded the Schola Cantorum. COMPOSED MOST RECENT INSTRUMENTATION 1886 CSO PERFORMANCES solo piano, three flutes and piccolo, February 13, 1945, Orchestra Hall. two oboes and english horn, two FIRST PERFORMANCE Robert Casadesus as soloist, Désiré clarinets and bass clarinet, three March 20, 1887, Paris Defauw conducting bassoons, four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trombones, August 7, 1947, Ravinia Festival. FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings Maxim Schapiro as soloist, Pierre March 20 & 21, 1903, Auditorium Monteux conducting Theatre. Rudolph Ganz as soloist, APPROXIMATE Theodore Thomas conducting PERFORMANCE TIME 27 minutes 3 Having been encouraged by Wagner to seek woodwinds accompanied by fluttering strings, out national characteristics of his own home- soon enters more turbulent emotional territory. land which paralleled those he admired in With the development section, there is a striking the German composer’s music dramas, d’Indy episode involving rippling piano and woodwind began researching folk music in such hitherto figuration which anticipates the dawn sequence little-examined regions in southeast France as of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. The movement Vercors, and particularly in his own ancestral eventually reaches a rousing climax, involving homeland within the Ardèche: Vivarais, and the climbing dotted rhythm, with brass fore- Périer, overlooking the Cévennes mountains, most (involving several harmonic turns which where he notated the mountain song upon which clearly inspired Fauré in later works). After the symphony is based (hence the alternative title the english horn’s recapitulation of the folk sometimes given the work, Symphonie cévenole. theme, the movement ends wistfully, some of D’Indy himself thought the scoring Wagnerian, its mildly sinister inflections recalling Berlioz, yet included in the work a virtuoso part for a very another composer d’Indy greatly admired. un-Wagnerian instrument—the piano. There The second movement evokes the great was some precedent in Franck’s Symphonic distances and valleys of the mountains. It opens Variations for piano and orchestra, composed just with the piano soloist playing yet another variant a year earlier, whose final section d’Indy’s work on the folk theme, answered by orchestra.