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, January 15, 2015, at 8:00 Friday, January 16, 2015, at 1:30 Saturday, January 17, 2015, at 8:00 Riccardo Muti Conductor Yefim Bronfman Piano Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83 Allegro non troppo Allegro appassionato Andante John Sharp, cello Allegretto grazioso YEFIM BRONFMAN INTERMISSION Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 13 (Winter Daydreams) Daydreams of a Winter Journey: Allegro tranquillo Land of Desolation, Land of Mists: Adagio cantabile ma non tanto Scherzo: Allegro scherzando giocoso Finale: Andante lugubre—Allegro maestoso These concerts are generously sponsored by the Zell 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 Johannes Brahms Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany. Died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria. Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83 Like Dürer, Goethe, and of the ideas for the piano concerto, and, at the a number of German same time, gave birth to new ones that he would composers before him, use when he returned to it. Back in Italy several Brahms found inspiration months later, Brahms was filled with feelings he in Italy. His first trip was could hardly name; he returned to Vienna noting in the spring of 1878, that it seemed “wrong” to call it home after days and, as he wrote home to of such unexpected contentment elsewhere. He his publisher Fritz immediately turned to his sketches, and, in one Simrock, it was filled virtually uninterrupted sweep, forged his most with “magical days.” magnificent concerto, one of the largest—both Brahms made eight Italian sojourns over the next grand and long—in the literature. few years (he liked to spend his birthday there if We could read all of Brahms’s letters and learn possible), preparing each time with his character- very little about his music. Like many compos- istic compulsion by reading guidebooks and ers, he said what he had to say in the pages of studying treatises on art. His personal guide on his scores. His few, sporadic comments about the first trip was Theodore Billroth, a prominent composition were often either self-deprecating or Viennese surgeon, a devoted amateur musician teasing. He introduced this concerto to his dear (he played piano duets with the composer), and a friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg as “a tiny walking Baedeker. During their travels, Brahms little piano concerto with a tiny little wisp of a was moved to put pen to paper, not to record the scherzo”—words contradicted by a cursory glance pleasures of the trip—at least not in the form of a at the score. Another letter more accurately conventional diary—but to begin sketching a calls it “the long terror,” which most pianists new piano concerto in B-flat. will readily confirm. But of the actual details of At home, Brahms put this music aside, as if, composition, its unprecedented scale, or wide finding himself stuck in Vienna, he couldn’t emotional range, Brahms said nothing. When continue with music conceived in the warm Billroth asked the most obvious question— Italian sun. Soon his attention was diverted by why he had added a fourth movement to the his violin concerto, a work that sublimated some customary three, all of extraordinary size and COMPOSED MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE 1878–July 7, 1881 CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME February 17, 18 & 19, 2011, Orchestra 48 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE Hall. Leif Ove Andsnes as soloist, November 9, 1881, Budapest. The Gianandrea Noseda conducting CSO RECORDINGS composer as soloist 1958. Emil Gilels as soloist, Fritz Reiner August 8, 2012, Ravinia Festival. conducting. RCA Yefim Bronfman as soloist, James FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES Conlon conducting 1960. Sviatoslav Richter as soloist, Erich March 1 & 2, 1895, Auditorium Theatre. Leinsdorf conducting. RCA Rafael Joseffy as soloist, Theodore INSTRUMENTATION Thomas conducting 1961. Van Cliburn as soloist, Fritz solo piano, two flutes and piccolo, two Reiner conducting. RCA July 16, 1942, Ravinia Festival. oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, Artur Schnabel as soloist, George four horns, two trumpets, timpani, 1977. Daniel Barenboim as soloist, Szell conducting strings Carlo Maria Giulini conducting. CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years) 2 scope—Brahms only pianist early on, with a cadenza-like flourish. The said that the first beginning of this concerto is pure, characteristic movement was so Brahms, however: the lone call of the horn (a harmless (simpel) that sound Brahms grew to love from his earliest another movement days, when he often heard his father practicing seemed in order the instrument) answered by slowly blossoming before the Andante. phrases from the piano. Billroth was With this magical introduction, the impas- with the composer sioned “cadenza” that follows, and another when he drafted fifteen minutes of strong and demanding music, the concerto, and Brahms’s first movement is far from “harmless.” he was present the Donald Tovey was perhaps the first to point out Theodore Billroth evening Brahms first that, although it’s conventional in a concerto for played through the the orchestra to deliver “with massive force what finished work for a the solo player can make subtle and delicate with group of friends. Like the composer’s first piano eloquence and ornamentation,” Brahms switches concerto, it was designed for his own hands, roles, allowing the piano some grand and power- and most pianists since have found it somewhat ful statements where we least expect them. Tovey unwieldy. Brahms played the solo at the pre- also notes that Brahms lets the orchestra borrow miere on November 9, 1881, in Budapest, and in material from the soloist, rather than the reverse. many additional performances that season—in Brahms has decisively placed his soloist on equal Stuttgart, Zurich, Breslau, Leipzig, Hamburg, footing with the orchestra. Berlin, Frankfurt, and Utrecht, among oth- Brahms contemplated inserting a scherzo in ers. Soon Franz Liszt’s curiosity was aroused, his violin concerto—written while the B-flat particularly because the distinguished conductor piano concerto sat on the shelf—but thought bet- Hans von Bülow (who had been married to ter of it. Here, however, he very shrewdly placed Liszt’s daughter Cosima before Wagner took her) something energetic and tempestuous between was a strong supporter of Brahms’s music, and the broad, magnificent expanses of the first he asked to have a copy of the new work sent to movement and the serene and spacious Andante. him. Probably only a composer whose own wildly The slow movement surely benefits from the virtuosic piano concertos had turned heads a delay. Coming some twenty-five minutes into quarter century before could find this concerto “a the concerto, and following so much brilliant little gray in tone,” but Liszt cautiously admitted and dramatic music, the breathtakingly beautiful his admiration for this music, “in which thought cello solo with which the Andante opens is music and feeling move in noble harmony.” Brahms had from another world—and temporary consolation long known that he and Liszt were of radically for the fact that Brahms never wrote a cello con- different musical temperaments—probably since certo. (After hearing Dvořák’s, Brahms admitted the day they met during the summer of 1853, he was sorry he had never tried, and then made when Brahms was twenty, and Liszt, forty-one, partial amends with the Double Concerto.) whipped through the young composer’s piano The finale is a lilting dance of uncertain music at sight. Hungarian heritage, transparently scored and Liszt surely didn’t think that it was novel to filled with sparkling effects from the piano. In bring the soloist in at the start of a concerto, as lesser hands, such childlike happiness might have Brahms does here, but Liszt also knew enough seemed inappropriate or simply too lightweight about Brahms to know that novelty is seldom after so much serious and even tragic music, but at the heart of his achievements. In its general Brahms’s touch is very sure—he easily convinces plan, the opening of the B-flat concerto suggests us that the only thing that can follow some of no one more than Beethoven, who in his fifth the most sublime slow music ever written is a and unfinished sixth concertos introduces the gypsy dance. 3 Piotr Tchaikovsky Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Symphony No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 13 (Winter Daydreams) In 1866, the year 1865. Straight out of school, with a silver medal Tchaikovsky wrote his and fine recommendations, Tchaikovsky set First Symphony, a off for Moscow in January 1866, where he had middle-aged Anton accepted a teaching post at Nikolai Rubinstein’s Bruckner finally finished Russian Musical Society (later the Moscow his own first symphony, Conservatory). The move at first proved difficult, after fifteen months of but Tchaikovsky soon fell into the pattern of tough going and with two teaching; reported “an unusually sympathetic earlier efforts left aban- relationship with the Moscow ladies whom I doned and unfinished. teach”; made many new friends, including his Johannes Brahms had already been working future publisher, Piotr Jurgenson; discovered quietly on his first symphony for a decade—and Dickens (The Pickwick Papers made him laugh it would take another ten years before he was aloud); and benefitted from the domineering satisfied with it. But Tchaikovsky, in his presence of Rubinstein, who not only oversaw mid-twenties and fresh from the conservatory, Tchaikovsky’s musical affairs and dictated his launched his symphonic career with little anxiety musical tastes, but also bought him an entire or experience, turning out this Symphony no.