Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Charles Dutoit Conductor Music by Igor Stravinsky Fireworks, Op. 4
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PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, May 19, 2016, at 8:00 Friday, May 20, 2016, at 1:30 Charles Dutoit Conductor Music by Igor Stravinsky Fireworks, Op. 4 Symphony in C Moderato alla breve Larghetto concertante— Allegretto Largo—Tempo giusto INTERMISSION The Firebird Friday’s performance is generously endowed by Elaine Frank in loving memory of Zollie S. Frank. This work is part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective, which is generously sponsored by the Sargent Family Foundation. 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 Igor Stravinsky Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia. Died April 6, 1971, New York City. Fireworks, Op. 4 This is the first music by seems that these sentiments were reciprocated, but Stravinsky the Chicago it was only later that I learned so from his family. Symphony Orchestra ever His characteristic reserve had never allowed him played. Frederick Stock to make any sort of display of his feelings.” included it on the second One day, Stravinsky mentioned to half of his program on Rimsky-Korsakov that he was writing a new January 22, 1915, sand- orchestral fantasy: wiched between music by Eric DeLamarter and the He seemed interested and told me to send Queen Mab Scherzo from it to him as soon as it was ready. I finished Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet. The program book it in six weeks and sent it off to the country mentions (in passing and without comment) a place where he was spending the summer. A recent ballet by Stravinsky called The Rite of few days later a telegram informed me of his Spring; the importance of that score, one of the death and shortly afterwards my registered few truly revolutionary works of the twentieth package was returned to me: “Not delivered century, wasn’t yet appreciated, even though it had on account of death of addressee.” caused a riot at its premiere in Paris little more than a year before. Stravinsky dedicated Fireworks to Rimsky’s daughter Nadia, in honor of her marriage ireworks is a small piece of great his- to Maximilian Steinberg. Apparently the torical importance. Stravinsky began it Steinbergs didn’t appreciate the gesture, then in the spring of 1908, at a time when or later. In fact, Stravinsky’s relations with Fhe often went to see his beloved teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov’s family deteriorated almost mentor, and recently appointed father-figure, literally from the day of the funeral, when he and Rimsky-Korsakov. “He seemed to like my visits,” Rimsky’s widow had exchanged heated words. Stravinsky later wrote. “He had my deep affec- In 1962, when Stravinsky returned to Russia for tion, and I was genuinely attached to him. It the first time in nearly a half century and invited COMPOSED CSO PERFORMANCES, three trumpets, three trombones 1908 THE COMPOSER CONDUCTING and tuba, bass drum, cymbals, November 7 & 12, 1940, Orchestra Hall glockenspiel, triangle, celesta, two FIRST PERFORMANCE harps, timpani, strings July 21, 1962, Ravinia Festival February 6, 1909; Saint Petersburg, Russia APPROXIMATE MOST RECENT PERFORMANCE TIME CSO PERFORMANCES FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES 4 minutes July 7, 1968, Ravinia Festival. Seiji January 22 & 23, 1915, Orchestra Hall. Ozawa conducting Frederick Stock conducting CSO RECORDINGS September 11, 12 & 14, 2004, Orchestra 1946. Désiré Defauw conducting. RCA June 26, 1951, Ravinia Festival. William Hall. Sir Andrew Davis conducting Steinberg conducting 1968. Seiji Ozawa conducting. RCA INSTRUMENTATION 1992. Pierre Boulez conducting. three flutes and piccolo, two oboes Deutsche Grammophon and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, six horns, 2 Nadia Steinberg to a concert of music which him to orchestrate music by Chopin and Grieg included Fireworks, she declined. for the upcoming ballet season in Paris and com- But Fireworks found a most receptive audience missioned him to compose the score for a new at the first performance in Saint Petersburg ballet he was planning on the Russian legend of in 1909, for that night the crowd included the Firebird. The rest, of course, is history, but the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. He was so the fresh force of a singular new voice in music is impressed with Stravinsky’s music (the Scherzo felt throughout these four explosive, astonishing fantastique also was performed) that he invited minutes of orchestral fireworks. Igor Stravinsky Symphony in C Performed as part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective Stravinsky wrote a in the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, composed in symphony at the very 1938 to celebrate the thirtieth wedding anniver- beginning of his career— sary of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, whose it’s his op. 1—but he home in Washington, D.C., gave the work quickly became famous as its name. the composer of three That same year, Mrs. Bliss, along with Mrs. ballet scores (Petrushka, John Alden Carpenter and several of her friends The Firebird, and The Rite in Chicago, asked Stravinsky to write something of Spring), and he spent to honor the CSO’s fiftieth anniversary in the the next few years 1940–41 season. (Stravinsky later reported that composing for the theater and the opera house. he was paid $2,500 for the commission and that When, in 1920, he finally returned to writing he accepted partly because he was nearly broke.) music for an orchestra on the concert stage, he To celebrate a milestone in the life of a great composed the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, American orchestra, Stravinsky decided to tackle which omits strings entirely and is no symphony the “standard” by writing a symphony in C in in the conventional sense of the word. the four orthodox movements—sonata-allegro, Throughout the 1920s, Stravinsky began to put slow movement, scherzo, finale—scored for a his personal stamp on the traditional forms of Beethoven-size orchestra (throwing in the tuba orchestral music—these scores are the earliest of for added measure). He did not foresee that this his so-called neoclassical works. He wrote a work would become, in effect, his American series of concertos—two for piano, one for passport—the score that would accompany his violin, and his own little Brandenburg Concerto move to this country. Nor did he know that its COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1938–August 19, 1940 November 7, 8 & 12, 1940, Orchestra three flutes and piccolo, two oboes, Hall. The composer conducting two clarinets, two bassoons, four DEDICATION (world premiere) horns, two trumpets, three trombones “This symphony, composed to the and tuba, timpani, strings August 14 & 17, 1968, Ravinia Festival. Glory of God, is dedicated to the New York City Ballet as soloists, Robert Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the APPROXIMATE Irving conducting occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of PERFORMANCE TIME its existence.” 28 minutes MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES CSO RECORDING March 20, 21 & 22, 2008, Orchestra 1997. Sir Georg Solti conducting. Hall. Charles Dutoit conducting London 3 composition would see him through the most even notice. (Twenty-five years later, when he difficult time of his personal life. recorded the symphony, he commented that it Stravinsky began the first movement in his flat was still unpleasant for him to talk about the on the rue Saint Honoré in Paris in the autumn work, since it recalled his most tragic year.) of 1938. On November 30, his daughter Ludmilla Stravinsky always insisted that his personal died of tuberculosis—the “family disease” as crises at the time were not apparent in this music. the composer would soon call it, with ample (He did confess, however, that “the upheaval evidence—in the sanatorium at Sancellmoz, caused by the war, though neither tragic nor where his wife Catherine and younger daughter terrible in my case, was nevertheless a difficult were also being treated. “It is no exaggeration environment for composition.”) The Symphony in to say that in the following weeks I was able to C is decidedly abstract, its face turned away from continue my own life only by my work on the the world in which it was created. “I did not seek Symphony in C,” Stravinsky later recalled. Three to overcome my grief by portraying or giving months later, Catherine died. Stravinsky himself expression to it in music,” he later wrote, “and then moved to Sancellmoz, as he too had been you will listen in vain, I think, for traces of this diagnosed with the disease. That June, his mother sort of personal emotion.” Stravinsky is not, died. “For the third time in six months I heard of course, the first composer whose art reveals the long requiem service, walked in the field nothing of his private life—only consider beyond Paris to the cemetery of Sainte Geneviève, Beethoven’s light and witty Second Symphony, dropped a handful of dirt in an open grave,” written the autumn he contemplated suicide. But he later wrote. “And for the third time I saved Stravinsky’s musical stoicism has often drawn myself—or at any rate recovered—by composing.” skepticism, and he has sometimes provoked out- Stravinsky finished the second movement of the right anger with his most famous statement on Symphony in C in the sanatorium in Sancellmoz. the subject: “I consider that music is, by its very The death of three dear family members, nature, essentially powerless to express anything compounded by the impending threat of war, at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a persuaded Stravinsky to break with his past and psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature.” leave Europe.