PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTy-THIRD SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, November 14, 2013, at 8:00 Friday, November 15, 2013, at 8:00 Saturday, November 16, 2013, at 8:00 Charles Dutoit Conductor Tatiana Pavlovskaya Soprano John Mark Ainsley Tenor Matthias Goerne Baritone Chicago Symphony Chorus Duain Wolfe Chorus Director Chicago Children’s Chorus Josephine Lee Artistic Director Britten War Requiem, Op. 66 Requiem aeternum Dies irae Offertorium Sanctus Agnus Dei Libera me There will be no intermission. Performed in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the composer’s birth on November 22, 1913. The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus this season is underwritten in part with a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie. Saturday’s concert is endowed in part by the League of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, Redeye, The Onion, and Metromix 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 Benjamin Britten Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, Sussex, England. Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England. War Requiem, Op. 66 Roger Burney died aboard original church had been bombed to rubble the French submarine during nightly air raids in mid-November 1940), Surcouf in February 1942. these four young men brought immediacy to David Gill was killed in the vast and unmanageable subject of war. As action in the Mediterra- the War Requiem took shape, they personalized nean. Michael Halliday the tragedy of battle and helped him never to was declared missing in lose sight of individual private lives against the action in 1944. Piers background of world history. It is these four Dunkerley was wounded names, unfamiliar to all but their families and and taken prisoner during friends, that Britten put on the dedication page the Normandy landings in 1944; he was released of his War Requiem. at the war’s end, returned to civilian life, and It was another dead soldier, the victim of an planned to marry, but killed himself on earlier world war, who gave voice to Britten’s June 7, 1959. lifelong pacifi st views and provided much of the Photographs of these four men were found in text for the Coventry requiem. Wilfred Owen an envelope among Benjamin Britten’s belong- died in action on November 4, 1918, while ings after his death. Th ey all knew the composer, leading his troops across the Sambre Canal none of them especially well, but to Britten they in northeast France, exactly one week before were the faces of the dead—hauntingly familiar the Armistice. (His parents didn’t receive the victims of war. As he sat down to write a requiem telegram of their son’s death until November 11, mass for the rebuilt cathedral in Coventry (the the news bringing them face to face with grief COMPOSED Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis, (accompanied by organ), a full orches- 1961–62 director) and Glen Ellyn Children’s tra, and a chamber orchestra. The main Chorus (Doreen Rao, director); Leonard orchestra consists of three fl utes and FIRST PERFORMANCE Slatkin conducting the orchestra piccolo, two oboes and english horn, May 30, 1962; Saint Michael’s and chamber orchestra, Doreen Rao three clarinets, e-fl at clarinet and bass Cathedral, Coventry, England conducting the children’s chorus clarinet, two bassoons and contrabas- soon, six horns, four trumpets, three FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES MOST RECENT trombones and tuba, piano, organ, June 27, 1972, Ravinia Festival. CSO PERFORMANCES timpani, snare drums, tenor drum, bass Phyllis Curtin, Robert Tear, and John May 9, 10 & 11, 2002, Orchestra drum, tambourine, triangle, cymbals, Shirley-Quirk as soloists; Chicago Hall. Olga Guriakowa, Ian Bostridge, castanets, whip, chinese blocks, Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis, and Andreas Schmidt as soloists; gong, bells, vibraphone, glockenspiel, director), Northwestern University Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain antique cymbals, and strings. The Chorus and Concert Choir (Margaret Wolfe, director) and The American chamber orchestra consists of fl ute Hillis, director), and Glen Ellyn Boychoir (Vincent Metallo, director); and piccolo, oboe and english horn, Children’s Theatre Chorus (Doreen Rao, Mstislav Rostropovich conducting the clarinet, bassoon, horn, timpani, snare director); István Kertész conducting orchestra, Duain Wolfe conducting the drum, bass drum, cymbal, gong, harp, the orchestra, György Fischer conduct- chamber orchestra, Vincent Metallo two violins, viola, cello, and bass. ing the chamber orchestra, Margaret conducting the children’s chorus Hillis conducting the children’s chorus APPROXIMATE INSTRUMENTATION PERFORMANCE TIME February 13, 14 & 16, 1986, Orchestra soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists; 77 minutes Hall. Margaret Marshall, John Aler, and a mixed chorus, children’s chorus Benjamin Luxon as soloists; Chicago 2 while the rest of England cheered the end of those from the mass for the dead—the juxtaposi- World War I.) In later years, Owen slowly gained tion of the ancient Latin service with these more acclaim for the terse and moving verses he wrote recent reports from the battlefield underlining in the trenches and on the battlefield. Britten the confrontation of public and private, and of knew him as the greatest of the First World past with present, giving the War Requiem its War poets. He owned a volume of Owen’s work, unsettling power. Before he sketched any of the and, in 1958, when the BBC radio program music, Britten wrote out his libretto in an old Personal Choice asked him for his favorite poems, school exercise book, with the mass text on the he included Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” the left page and the Owen poems facing on the text he would ultimately use at the end of the right, arrows carefully showing just how they War Requiem. That same year, Britten was were to dovetail. approached by He set to work, declining three new com- a member of missions and postponing work on Curlew River the Coventry so that he could concentrate on the Coventry Cathedral mass. In the two decades since Britten’s “other” Festival, requiem, the purely instrumental Sinfonia da which wanted Requiem, events had moved from bloody combat to commission to the sobering reality of devastated cities, heart- him to write a broken families, and mass graves. And 1961, large work to the year Britten devoted to the War Requiem, consecrate the was marred by the building of the Berlin new cathedral Wall, an ominous escalation of U. S. action in nearing Vietnam, and the incident of the Bay of Pigs. completion Owen’s poems, “full of the hate of destruction,” next to the and Britten’s new score, with its call for peace, ruins of couldn’t have been more timely. the ancient In February 1961, Britten wrote to Dietrich building. Fischer-Dieskau, asking him to sing the baritone By the time solos. Britten’s partner, Peter Pears, had already Poet Wilfred Owen Britten began agreed to take the tenor part. Britten’s scheme to compose was carefully drawn: these two soloists, accom- the score for panied by a chamber orchestra, would sing the Coventry in the summer of 1960, many deeply Owen texts as “a kind of commentary on the personal strands had come together—the loss mass.” The Latin text itself would be given to of four friends, his interest in the war poetry of full chorus and orchestra, along with a soprano Wilfred Owen, his own staunch pacifist beliefs, solo and boys’ choir (performed by a children’s the unshakable memory of visiting the concen- choir at these performances). It’s a blueprint tration camp at Belsen with Yehudi Menuhin shrewdly designed to point out the individual in 1945 before playing a recital for the victims’ amidst the crowd, to acknowledge personal grief families, his shock at the death of Gandhi in while preaching pacifism. That summer, when 1948, and a long-held desire to write a significant Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, large-scale choral piece. Almost inevitably, this came to the Aldeburgh Festival, Britten found great public work also became one of his most his soprano. Vishnevskaya gave a recital in private statements. Britten rarely referred to the Aldeburgh only days after Rostropovich played requiem in his letters during the many months the premiere of the new cello sonata Britten had when he was hard at work on it, as if it were too written for him. The night Vishnevskaya sang, personal to mention. Britten told her that he wanted to write the War In his copy of Owen’s book, Britten marked Requiem soprano solo for her. She was the final nine poems he intended to set to music as part link in his plan to bring together representa- of the requiem. Almost from the start, Britten tives of three nations devastated by the war: an knew he wanted to weave Owen’s texts in with English tenor, a German baritone, and a Russian 3 ‘Cathedral’ and Reconciliation with W. Germany . was too much for them,” Britten said. “How can you, a Soviet woman,” the minister of culture asked Vishnevskaya, “stand next to a German and an Englishman and perform a political work?” Heather Harper stepped in, learning the role just ten days before the performance. [Galina Vishnevskaya, who later recorded the War Requiem with Pears, Fischer-Dieskau, and Britten conduct- ing the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, died last December.] Five days before the May 30 premiere, the critic William Mann wrote in The Times that the War Requiem was Britten’s masterpiece, a verdict that, though premature, proved A rehearsal for the War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral in 1962.