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Segerstrom Center for the arts, renée and henry Segerstrom Concert hall Friday, February 17, 2012, 8pm

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Donna L. Kendall Classical Series& A Shanbrom Family Concert

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRARICCARDO MUTI, CONDUCTOR

Pacific 231, Mouvement symphonique No. 1 ARTHUR HONEGGER(1892-1955)

Alternative Energy MASON BATESFord’s Farm, 1896—Chicago, 2012Xinjiang Province, 2112—Reykjavik, 2222

Commissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Louise Durham Mead Fund for New Music

— I N T E R M I S S I O N —

Symphony in D minor CéSAR FRANCK(1822-1890)

Lento—Allegro non troppoAllegrettoAllegro non troppo

ChiCago Symphony orCheStra aSSoCiation220 S miChigan ave, ChiCago

(312) 294-3000cso.org

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The Philharmonic Society gratefully acknowledges Donna L. Kendall Foundation and the Shanbrom Family Foundation for their generous sponsorship of tonight’s performance.

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PROGR AM NOT E S

HONeGGeR: PAcific 231 (MOuveMeNT SyMPHONique NO. 1)Born March 10, 1892, Le Havre, FranceDied November 27, 1955, Paris, France

Instrumentation: two flutes and piccolo, two oboes andEnglish horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bas-soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets,three trombones and tuba, cymbal, snare drum, bassdrum, tam-tam, strings

“I have always had a passion for locomotives,” ArthurHonegger wrote after Pacific 231, his high-speed tonepoem named after a locomotive, became a runawayhit. “To me they are living beings, and I love them asothers love women or horses.”

Honegger first attracted attention in the early twentiesas a member of the group of French composers knownas Les Six, although history has cut that number inhalf, remembering just Honegger, along with DariusMilhaud and Francis Poulenc. Honegger was some-thing of an outsider in Les Six—he got involvedalmost by accident, and he never could stomach thepranksterish music of Eric Satie, who inspired thegroup and served as its spiritual mentor. In I Am aComposer, he writes, “I am what the language of pass-ports calls of ‘dual nationality,’ that is to say, a combi-nation of French and Swiss.” Born in Le Havre, hehad studied composition first in Zurich, his parents’hometown, and then commuted to Paris for two yearsto work at the conservatory. In 1913—Honegger wasnineteen—he settled in Paris, a city bursting withavant-garde surprises, later claiming that, despite hisSwiss upbringing, “all the rest—my intellectual blos-soming, the sharpening of my moral and spiritual val-ues—I owe to France.” Among the qualities he owedto Switzerland, Honegger listed “a naïve sense of hon-esty” and his knowledge of the Bible, though he mightalso have mentioned his lifelong love of Bach, whosecantatas he heard regularly in the Protestant church ofhis youth.

Honegger achieved almost overnight fame in 1921 forhis oratorio Le roi David (King David), but he causeda real stir two years later with Pacific 231. This shortorchestral work began life as one of three so-calledsymphonic movements, but Honegger quickly realizedthat, in a city still reeling from the shock of The Riteof Spring, his title was, as he put it, a bit colorless.“Suddenly a romantic idea crossed my mind, andwhen the work was finished I wrote the title, Pacific231, which indicates a locomotive for heavy loads andhigh speed,” he later recalled. “To tell the truth, inPacific I was pursuing a very abstract and quite unal-loyed idea, by giving the feeling of a mathematicalacceleration of rhythm, while the actual motion of thepiece slowed down. In musical terms, I composed a

huge, formal chorale, strewn with counterpoint in themanner of J. S. Bach.” But audience and critics couldonly hear the locomotive. “People of great talentwrote wonderful articles describing the driving-rods,the noise of the pistons, the screeching of the brakes,the hissing of steam, the commotion of the frontwheels, etc., etc.,” Honegger later wrote. This was theheight of Europe’s fascination with the age of themachine, and Pacific 231 was hailed as one of itslandmarks. (Actually, one critic, misunderstanding thetitle, discerned in Honegger’s high-powered writingthe smells of the open sea.) Honegger quickly becameknown as the man who wrote the piece about the train,even though, in fact, he hadn’t.

When Honegger conducted Pacific 231 in Chicago, atthe conclusion of a program entirely of his own worksperformed by the Chicago Symphony in 1929, he wasonce again praised as a master tone painter—“thesnorting, throbbing, tumultuous progress of a railroadengine is depicted with extraordinary skill,” one localcritic wrote. By then, Honegger had decided to playalong with Pacific 231’s many new fans. In the pub-lished score, he described the overall shape of thepiece: “the quiet breathing of the machine at rest, itseffort in starting, then the gathering speed, theprogress from mood to mood, as a 300-ton train hur-tles through the dark night, racing 120 miles an hour.”

Honegger composed Pacific 231 in 1923, and it wasfirst performed on May 8, 1924, in Paris.

BaTeS: AlternAtive energyBorn January 23, 1977, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Composed 2011

First performance: February 2, 2012; ChicagoSymphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conducting

Instrumentation: three flutes, alto flute and piccolo,three oboes and English horn, three bassoons and con-trabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trom-bones and tuba, laptop, an extensive percussion bat-tery, harp, piano, strings

Mason Bates’s music fuses orchestral writing, imagi-native narrative forms, the harmonies of jazz, and therhythms of techno. His symphonic music has receivedwidespread attention especially for the ways it incor-porates electronic sounds. Bates was appointed one ofthe Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composers-in-the Residence by Riccardo Muti, along with AnnaClyne, and took up the post in the 2010–11 season.

After a traditional musical upbringing in Richmond,Virginia, which included piano lessons and singing inthe choir, Bates studied composition and English liter-

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ature in the Columbia–Juilliard joint program. Heworked with David Del Tredici and John Corigliano,and then moved to the Bay Area in 2001 to enroll inthe Ph.D. program at Berkeley’s Center for NewMusic and Audio Technologies. His career, like hismusic, is a singular mix of old-world establishmentand new-age culture: he has been lavished with big-league honors, from institutions such as the AmericanAcademy in Rome and the American Academy forArts and Letters (an award that “acknowledges thecomposer who has arrived at his or her own voice”),and he has also spent many nights as a DJ, spinningand mixing at dance clubs in San Francisco, NewYork City, Berlin, and Rome. Alternative Energy, hislargest work to date, is his first composition writtenexpressly for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Mason Bates on Alternative energy

Alternative Energy is an “energy symphony” spanningfour movements and hundreds of years. Beginning ina rustic Midwestern junkyard in the late nineteenthcentury, the piece travels through ever greater andmore powerful forces of energy—a present-day parti-cle collider, a futuristic Chinese nuclear plant—until itreaches a future Icelandic rainforest, where humani-ty’s last inhabitants seek a return to a simpler way oflife.

The idée fixe that links these disparate worlds appearsearly in Ford’s Farm, 1896. This melody is heard onthe fiddle—conjuring a figure like Henry Ford—andis accompanied by junkyard percussion and a “phan-tom orchestra” that trails the fiddler like ghosts. Theaccelerando cranking of a car motor becomes a specialmotif in the piece, a kind of rhythmic embodiment of

ever more powerful energy. Indeed, this crank motifexplodes in the electronics in the second movement’spresent-day Chicago, where we encounter actualrecordings from the Fermilab particle collider. Hip-hop beats, jazzy brass interjections, and joyous volt-age surges bring the movement to a clangorous finish.

Zoom a hundred years into the dark future of theXinjiang Province, 2112 where a great deal of theChinese energy industry is based. On an eerie waste-land, a flute sings a tragically distorted version of thefiddle tune, dreaming of a forgotten natural world. Buta powerful industrial energy simmers to the surface,and over the ensuing hardcore techno, wild orchestralsplashes drive us to a catastrophic meltdown. As thesmoke clears, we find ourselves even further into thefuture: an Icelandic rainforest on a hotter planet.Gentle, out-of-tune pizzicati accompany our fiddler,who returns over a woody percussion ensemble tomake a quiet plea for simpler times. The occasionalsong of future birds whips around us, a naturalisticversion of the crank motif. Distant tribal voices callfor the building of a fire—our first energy source.

FRaNCK: SyMPHONy iN D MiNOR Born December 10, 1822, Liège, BelgiumDied November 8, 1890, Paris, France

Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes and Englishhorn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons,four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trom-bones and tuba, timpani, harp, and strings.

César Franck matured as a composer very late in life,but he first won acclaim as a child prodigy. He wasborn in Liège, in the French-speaking Walloon districtof the Netherlands; this heritage was reflected in themixture of French and Flemish in his name. Early onhe showed unusual musical talent, which his father,Nicolas-Joseph, set about nurturing, promoting, andfinally exploiting. In 1830, his father enrolled him inthe Liège Conservatory, and César made his first touras a virtuoso pianist at the age of eleven, travelingthroughout the newly-formed kingdom of Belgium.(His specialty was playing variations on popular operathemes à la Liszt.)

Having outgrown the Liège Conservatory, Césarmoved to Paris, with his entire family in tow, foradvanced study in 1835. When the Paris Conservatoryinitially rejected his application because of his Belgianbirth, Nicolas-Joseph sent for French naturalizationpapers. César was an exemplary student, and hewalked off with many top prizes. He was always inter-ested in composing, but his father discouraged himfrom entering the prestigious Prix de Rome competi-tion in the hope that he would devote his life to con-

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certizing. Nicolas-Joseph even pulled César out ofschool in 1842 to send him off on another recital tour,which was highlighted by a meeting with Franz Liszt,who encouraged him to keep composing.

Franck next won fame as an organist and a composerof organ music (his impassioned organ improvisationswere greatly celebrated). Then, in middle age, hedevoted himself to teaching, and, in the process, influ-encing an entire generation of French composers,including Vincent d’Indy and Ernest Chausson, whowere nearly idolatrous in their devotion. LikeBruckner (with whom he has sometimes been com-pared), Franck came into his own as a composer latein his career. His major works—this Symphony in Dminor, along with the violin sonata and the pianoquintet, the Symphonic Variations for piano andorchestra, and several symphonic poems—were allcomposed between 1880 and 1890, the last decadeof his life.

The symphony is by far the best known of Franck’sorchestral works. Although Franck called it a symphony in response to his students, who quite literally demanded that he try his hand at the form, itis not so much a work in the tradition of Beethoven asa hybrid characteristic of Franck, combining elementsof both symphony and symphonic poem in a themati-cally unified whole. Even in the late 1880s, the Frenchmusical public was put off by the unclassifiable natureof the piece. “The subscribers could make neitherhead nor tail of it,” d’Indy wrote of the chilly recep-tion at the premiere, “and the musical authorities werein much the same position.”

Although we think of Franck as a one-symphony com-poser like his countryman Georges Bizet, he had infact written an earlier symphony when he was study-ing in Paris (it was even performed in 1841) that wasplainly indebted to the Viennese classical tradition.The symphony he wrote in the mid-1880s, however, isthe “real” Franck, inspired by the music of Liszt andWagner, masters of thematic transformation, novelorchestral effects, and bold new forms. Franck alsowas influenced by the French orchestral tradition,although d’Indy, ever the loyal pupil, insisted thatFranck completed his symphony before he knewSaint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony, which was premieredin May 1886. But Franck’s short-score sketch is datedSeptember–October 1887, so his symphony may havebeen, at least in part, a reaction to Saint-Saëns’s strik-ing new work. We know that Franck finished theorchestration in August 1888, and that he alsoarranged the symphony for piano duet that year, obvi-ously hoping it would be a piece people would wantto play at home. He must have been as dismayed ashis students when the work fell flat at the premiere.

The D minor symphony has three movements, a for-mal layout that Franck used in nearly all his majorworks (a fondness inherited by his students as well).The entire score is saturated with the main theme ofthe first movement, a three-note motif that echoes thefamous questioning motto of Beethoven’s last stringquartet—he gave it the words Muss es sein? (Must itbe?)—which Liszt later transformed to unforgettableeffect in his symphonic poem Les préludes. (It also ismirrored in Wagner’s “fate” motif in The Ring.) Theopening movement follows the general guidelines ofsonata form, but it also ranges widely, reinventing andtransforming its basic thematic material as it goes; itoffers a tantalizing suggestion of the kind of magicFranck must have created while improvising at theorgan.

The Allegretto is both slow movement and scherzorolled into one. Its main melody, unfolded at a leisurely pace, is introduced by the English horn, anunconventional choice that particularly offended oneof the conservatory professors who attended the pre-miere: “Just mention a single symphony by Haydn orBeethoven with an English horn,” he demanded ofd’Indy that night, failing to recall the quite fantasticsymphony by Berlioz that makes magical (unforget-table, one would think) use of the instrument.(Actually, Haydn’s Symphony No. 22 (ThePhilosopher) calls for two English horns, but it wasunknown in France at the time.) Muted strings suggestthe spirit of a scherzo, continuing and at the same timecomplementing what has gone before.

“The finale takes up all the themes again, as in[Beethoven’s] Ninth,” Franck wrote. “They do notreturn as quotations, however; I have elaborated themand given them the role of new elements.” That is theessence of the entire score—music continuously revis-ited, transformed, and in the process reborn. “I riskeda great deal,” Franck said of his new symphony, “butthe next time I shall risk even more.” Perhaps chas-tened by the cool reception the work received, however, he wrote no more orchestral works. It wasonly after his death in 1890 that the D minor sympho-ny began to be played more and more—a spectacularperformance in Paris in 1893 may have marked theturning point—eventually becoming the most popularwork in Franck’s small but prime catalog.

Franck composed this symphony in 1886 and completed it in 1888. The first performance was given in Paris on February 17, 1889.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for theChicago Symphony Orchestra.

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