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, June 18, 2015, at 8:00 Friday, June 19, 2015, at 1:30 Saturday, June 20, 2015, at 8:00 Riccardo Muti Conductor Bates Anthology of Fantastic Zoology Forest: Twilight— Sprite Dusk— The A Bao A Qu Nymphs Night— The Gryphon Midnight— Sirens— The Zaratan— Madrugada World premiere Commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra INTERMISSION Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64 Andante—Allegro con anima Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza Waltz: Allegro moderato Finale: Andante maestoso—Allegro vivace These performances are sponsored by an anonymous donor in honor of Patricia Dash and Doug Waddell for their excellence in music education through the Percussion Scholarship Program, now celebrating its twentieth season. 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 Mason Bates Born January 23, 1978, Richmond, Virginia. Anthology of Fantastic Zoology “The task of art,” Jorge At the time, Bates was an English major—he Luis Borges said in an attended the Columbia–Juilliard joint program interview shortly before and received degrees in both English literature and his death, “is to transform musical composition—he didn’t realize that magi- what is continuously cal realism or any other form of fiction would have happening to us, to a direct impact on the music he would write. Now transform all these things that he is an established composer with a catalog into symbols, into music, of works that get regular performances—a recent into something which can survey claims he is the second most performed last in man’s memory.” living composer—Bates says that literature is his Mason Bates, the Chicago Symphony’s Mead primary nonmusical influence. Yet although books Composer-in-Residence, discovered Borges in a have often served as a reference point—the form Latin American literature course at Columbia of Alternative Energy, the “energy symphony” he University. “His use of nonfiction prose style wrote for the CSO and Muti and introduced here when describing the realm of fantasy and in February 2012, was indebted to the changing imagination is unmatched by any writer,” Bates time frames of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—this says today. Bates’s new work, Anthology of is his first major work that is actually based on a Fantastic Zoology—written for the Chicago book. In his preface to the anthology, Borges says Symphony and Riccardo Muti, to mark the end that it was never intended for consecutive reading, of Bates’s residency with the CSO—is a fabulist and he recommends that the reader dip into the concerto for orchestra that was inspired by one of pages at random, “just as one plays with the shift- Borges’s greatest flights of fancy. ing patterns of a kaleidoscope,” giving Bates free Borges’s Manual de zoología fantástica was first reign to pick and choose from among Borges’s 120 published in 1957, at the time when Borges’s eye- creatures in compiling his own musical anthology. sight had deteriorated to the point that he could Bates selected creatures based on the musical no longer read what he was writing. His inner possibilities they offered. The Sprite, for example, vision, however, had never been more vivid, as he allowed him to toss material from one violin described mythical beasts from folklore, legend, stand to another—an effect he had long wanted and literature. When an expanded version of the to try—and then finally offstage. It is “something anthology came out a decade later, under the title like a miniature relay race at high speeds,” he The Book of Imaginary Beings, The New York Times says. The A Bao A Qu, a serpent that slithers up suggested it was the “skeleton-key to Borges’s a tower and then slides back down, suggested the literary imagination.” Although Borges’s writings form of a palindrome—music that is the same have inspired composers before, Bates is the first backwards and forwards. Bates had never heard to take the anthology as a point of departure. a musical palindrome that actually sounds like COMPOSED INSTRUMENTATION castanets, tam-tam, ratchet, Asian 2014 three flutes and piccolo, three oboes woodblock, suspended cymbals, and english horn, three clarinets, E-flat wind machine, conga, tambourine, These are the world clarinet and bass clarinet, three bas- almglocken, hi-hat, whip, vibraphone, premiere performances. soons and contrabassoon, four horns, wood switches, Asian drum, timpani, Commissioned by the Chicago three trumpets and piccolo trumpet, harp, piano, celesta, strings Symphony Orchestra three trombones, tuba, xylophone, glockenspiel, large Chinese drum, APPROXIMATE Dedicated to music director woodblocks, crash cymbals, crotales, PERFORMANCE TIME Riccardo Muti triangle, bass drum, snare drum, 30 minutes 2 one—“as if the record suddenly spins backwards,” sounds. For what he calls his “swan song” to the he says—and he spent a lot of time finding Chicago Symphony, Bates has paid it the greatest material that could be “perceptively reversible.” tribute by writing a concerto for orchestra. (The midpoint, when the music turns back on itself, is marked by a pause in the orchestra and Mason Bates on Anthology of the “ecstasio” outburst of the wind machine.) Fantastic Zoology Bates wanted to create a series of colorful char- acter movements—similar to a ballet suite—and he slim size of Jorge Luis Borges’s then combine them in the finale. But Bates knew Anthology of Fantastic Zoology belies that the success of a work structured like a ballet the teeming bestiary contained within depends on the highly individual and colorful itsT pages. A master of magical realism and identity of each movement. “Creating distinctive narrative puzzles, Borges was the perfect music that can be remembered has always been a writer to create a compendium of mythological challenge for contemporary composers,” he says, creatures. Several are of his own invention. “but whole vistas open if you can create memo- The musical realization of this, a kind of psy- rable music”—something that can last in man’s chedelic Carnival of the Animals, is presented in memory, as Borges put it. eleven interlocking movements (a sprawling form Linking Bates’s movements are “forest inter- inspired by French and Russian ballet scores). In ludes” that work like the promenades in Pictures between evocations of creatures familiar (sprite, from an Exhibition. But while Mussorgsky’s inter- nymph) and unknown (an animal that is an ludes are relatively simple—“like a palate-cleanser island), brief “forest interludes” take us deeper between paintings,” as Bates says—the Anthology into the night, and deeper into the forest itself. interludes are surreal and increasingly dark, as Imaginative creatures provoke new sounds and the work progresses from twilight to dawn. As a instrumentation, with a special focus on spatial result, the sequence of bestiary portraits, them- possibilities using a variety of soloists. For exam- selves growing in size as the work progresses, ple, the opening Sprite hops from music stand is overlaid with a sense of time moving forward to music stand, even bouncing offstage. The A through the hours of the night—all leading up Bao A Qu is a serpentine creature that slithers up to the witching-hour finale. Bates is a natural a tower; gloriously molts at the top; then slides storyteller, and he has written this score with back down, so the entire movement—like the Riccardo Muti’s “unique abilities as a musical life-cycle of the animal—is an exact palindrome. dramatist” in mind. “Imaginative narratives were Nymphs features two frolicking clarinets, while once a powerful force in symphonic music,” Bates The Gryphon uses timpani and brass to conjure a says, “and I have been fascinated with bringing flying lion that hunts horses (in this case, the vio- them back with entirely new sounds.” lins). The lyrical core of the piece, Sirens, features offstage violins that lure the rest of the strings, he Anthology of Fantastic Zoology is the one by one, to an epiphany. But it is short-lived, as largest work Bates has written—and one the island they near devours them in The Zaratan, of the few without his signature infusion an island-sized animal conjured by tone clusters. ofT electronica. Chicago audiences first got to The sprawling finale occurs at the witching-hour know Bates’s music through works that regularly moment between midnight and dawn (madrugada, featured him onstage at his laptop, overseeing from the Spanish). This movement collapses the a great array of sounds—from recordings of the entire work upon itself, and all of the animals fuse 1965 Gemini IV spacewalk in The B-Sides, which together in the darkest, deepest part of the forest. Riccardo Muti conducted here in 2011, to the In the virtuosity the piece requires of soloists Fermilab particle accelerator in Alternative Energy. and sections, it resembles a concerto for orches- But in the Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, Bates tra, and every note was written with specific found that he needed no more than the musicians players in mind. Many of the players in the of this orchestra to create even the wildest and Chicago Symphony Orchestra have become dear most fantastical music he was after—the score is friends, as has Maestro Riccardo Muti—whose so full of unconventional sonic effects, he says, unique abilities as a musical dramatist inspired that you may imagine you are hearing electronic the piece from beginning to end.