PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Zell Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant

This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Friday, November 27, 2015, at 8:00 Saturday, November 28, 2015, at 8:00Sunday, November 29, 2015, at 3:00

Marin Alsop ConductorJon Kimura Parker Piano

ClyneMasqueradeFirst CSO performances

BarberSecond Essay for Orchestra, Op. 17

GershwinRhapsody in Blue

JON KIMURA PARKER

INTERMISSION

DvořákSymphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70Allegro maestosoPoco adagioScherzo: VivaceFinale: Allegro

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Anna ClyneBorn March 9, 1980, London, England.

Masquerade

On a historic occasion of a magnitude earlier composers such as Samuel Barber, George Gershwin, or Antonín Dvořák cannot have imagined, the Last Night at the Proms opened in September of 2013 with the world premiere of

Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, which was broadcast globally by the BBC and viewed by millions. This week’s performances of Masquerade reunite Clyne, who was the Chicago Symphony’s Mead Composer-in-Residence from 2010 until last June, with Marin Alsop, who conducted the premiere—and made history of her own that night (“After months of planning,” she wrote on the Huffington Post later that month, “the Last Night of the Proms finally arrived. I was going to conduct classical music’s biggest party of the year and, as news reports across the world made clear, become the first woman to conduct this august occasion.”)

Clyne was entering the third season of her Chicago Symphony residency at the time, and the Orchestra had already played two works she had written for them. Night Ferry, premiered under Riccardo Muti’s baton in February 2012, was designed to complement the music of Franz Schubert, and found its dark colors and volatile shape after Clyne read that Schubert suffered from cyclothymia, a form of depression. Prince of Clouds, performed in December of 2012, is a double violin concerto that pays homage to

the teacher-student lineage of the soloists for whom it was composed (Jaime Laredo and Jennifer Koh) and at the same time to Bach’s famous concerto for two violins. Clyne’s final CSO commission, performed last May, more than a year after the London Proms premiere, is The Seamstress, a violin concerto which also was written for Koh.

A fter living primarily in the United States since 2002, the 2013 Proms premiere of Masquerade reunited Clyne

with her native London, where she grew up in a home in which folk music and the Beatles reigned, and where she wrote her first fully notated piece, for flute and piano, at the age of eleven. Clyne studied cello at Edinburgh University before she moved to New York. At twenty-three, she received a scholarship to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music, and her career as a composer soon took off. Clyne has since received several important honors, including eight consecu- tive ASCAP Plus awards and a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Prince of Clouds, available as a digital download on CSO Resound, was nominated for a 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition.

Anna Clyne on Masquerade

M asquerade draws inspiration from the original mid-eighteenth-century promenade concerts held in London’s

COMPOSED2013

FIRST PERFORMANCESeptember 7, 2013; Royal Albert Hall, London, England

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESThese are the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances.

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three

trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME5 minutes

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Samuel BarberBorn March 9, 1910, West Chester, Pennsylvania.Died January 23, 1981, New York City.

Second Essay for Orchestra, Op. 17

COMPOSED1942

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 16, 1942, New York City

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESNovember 24, 1959, Orchestra Hall. Walter Hendl conducting

July 18, 1942, Ravinia Festival. George Szell conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJune 30, 1953, Ravinia Festival. Eugene Ormandy conducting

November 13, 14, 15 & 18, 2003, Orchestra Hall. David Zinman conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME11 minutes

Samuel Barber was one of the lucky ones. His talent was discovered early and nourished by an unusually musical family. (His aunt was the distinguished Metropolitan Opera contralto Louise Homer.) He began playing piano at the age of six and

composing at seven. When, at nine, he informed his parents he intended to be a composer—words parents seldom greet with joy or sympathy—he was encouraged. “Dear Mother,” his confession begins,

I have written to tell you my worrying secret. . . . To begin with I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer and will be I am sure. I’ll ask you one more thing—Don’t ask me to try and

forget this unpleasant thing and go and play football.

At the age of fourteen, Samuel became a charter student at the new Curtis Institute of Music. He studied conducting briefly with Fritz Reiner (later music director of the Chicago Symphony), who said he had no talent on the podium. Several of his student compositions, however, were the work of an advanced composer, and a few, including Dover Beach and the Cello Sonata, have earned perma-nent places in the repertory. Success came early to Barber—he was only twenty-three when the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the world premiere of his first orchestral score, the Overture to The School for Scandal; his next, Music for a Scene from Shelley, was introduced by the New York Philharmonic two years later. In 1937, his Symphony no. 1 was the first music by an American to be performed at the Salzburg Festival. (Later, his Vanessa was the first American opera to be staged there.)

pleasure gardens. As is true today, these concerts were a place where people from all walks of life mingled to enjoy a wide array of music. Other forms of entertainment ranged from the sedate to the salacious, with acrobatics, exotic street enter-tainers, dancers, fireworks, and masquerades. I am fascinated by the historic and sociological courtship between music and dance. Combined with costumes, masked guises, and elaborate settings, masquerades created an exciting, yet

controlled, sense of occasion and celebration. It is this that I wish to evoke in Masquerade.

The work derives its material from two melo-dies. For the main theme, I imagined a chorus welcoming the audience and inviting them into their imaginary world. The second theme, “Juice of Barley,” is an old English country dance melody and drinking song, which first appeared in John Playford’s 1695 edition of The English Dancing Master.

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Barber’s music was performed and championed by some of the most celebrated figures of his day—Vladimir Horowitz introduced the Piano Sonata; Arturo Toscanini the First Essay for Orchestra and the famous Adagio for Strings; Leontyne Price regularly sang many of the songs; Barber wrote Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for Eleanor Steber and his ballet Medea for Martha Graham.

B runo Walter, the great Austrian conduc-tor, first heard Barber’s music courtesy of Toscanini, and he was so impressed

that he commissioned Barber to write a Second Essay for Orchestra, as a companion to the one Toscanini had premiered. Composed early in 1942, it was the last major work Barber wrote before he was inducted into the Air Force.

Barber chose his title carefully. The Second Essay, like his First, is a short discourse on a central topic. It doesn’t allow for the symphonic scale or multiple narrative strands of the novel. Like the celebrated essays by E.B. White that appeared in The New Yorker at the time, Barber’s score is personal, impassioned, and to the point. His main idea is a lovely, supple theme intro-duced by the flute and quickly taken up by other winds. The strings expand on the material, and the essay grows more animated. A sudden tutti chord clears the air; although the next section,

a fast and witty fugal passage, changes the pace, texture, and mood, the original subject matter is still the main point of reference. The ending is grand and serious.

“The essayist is a self-liberated man,” E.B. White wrote, “sustained by the child-ish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happened to him, is of general interest.” It is precisely this single-minded commitment to expressing his own feelings that distinguished Barber’s finest work, even though it made him no friends in the avant-garde music circles that flourished after World War II.

In 1971, nearly thirty years after the Second Essay, Barber summed up the attitude that had always governed his career, both in his heyday and when he was criticized for being hopelessly out of fashion:

When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I’m not a self-conscious composer. . . . It is said that I have no style at all but that doesn’t matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.

Today, as his music continues to gain in favor, it’s clear that Barber, not his critics, will have the last word.

George GershwinBorn September 26, 1898, Brooklyn, New York.Died July 11, 1937, Hollywood, California.

Rhapsody in Blue

This was the twenty- second of twenty-three pieces on a Sunday afternoon program misleadingly titled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” and it followed The Livery Stable Blues (with barn-yard sound effects), a

“semi-symphonic” arrangement of Irving Berlin tunes, and a Suite of Serenades by Victor Herbert. “Then stepped upon the stage, sheepishly, a lank

and dark young man—George Gershwin,” The New York Times reported. And, launched by the spectacular clarinet cadenza that Gershwin had jotted down in his sketchbooks scarcely a month before, Rhapsody in Blue made history.

Organized by bandleader Paul Whiteman, the concert proposed to trace the evolution of jazz, although the comments printed in the program, boasting about “the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular” are hardly promising. Rhapsody in Blue alone

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In conjunction with A Century of Progress International Exposition—the World’s Fair held in Chicago to celebrate the city’s centennial—several concerts were given at the Auditorium Theatre under the auspices of Chicago Friends of Music. The first concert of the series on June 14, 1933, was a celebration of American music, and during the first half of the program, Frederick Stock led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Henry Hadley’s In Bohemia Overture and Deems Taylor’s Through the Looking-Glass Suite. After intermission, conductor William Daly and pianist George Gershwin took the stage for the thirty-four-year-old composer’s Concerto in F, An American in Paris, and Rhapsody in Blue.

“We may put by forever explanation, apologia, and réserve in writing about American music after hearing George Gershwin and his compositions last night at the Auditorium. Gershwin is American music translated in terms of audacity, humor, wit, cleverness, spontaneity, vitality, and overwhelming naturalness.

Nothing like his Concerto in F has ever been heard in the symphonic world, and if it is not the very essence of Amercanism, I do not know my profession nor the art it serves,” wrote Herman Devries in the Chicago American. “Gershwin vibrates to the tune of a people and is animated by its own pulse beat. . . . He is the music of America.”

Gershwin and Daly appeared once more with the Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival on July 25, 1936, for a gala concert during the festival’s first season. A capacity crowd—by some estimates over 8,000 people, many climbing trees for a glimpse of the performers—packed

the park to hear an all-Gershwin concert that again featured the Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue with the composer as soloist, along with Daly leading An American in Paris and a suite from Porgy and Bess.

Frank Villella is the director of the Rosenthal Archives. For more information regarding the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s anniversary season, please visit cso.org/125moments.

Composers in Chicago

Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1933

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justified Whiteman’s dubious “experiment” by single-handedly opening a new chapter in the history of jazz.

Ironically, Gershwin knew nothing about Rhapsody in Blue until a few weeks before the concert, when he saw his name in the New York Tribune: “George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto.” When Gershwin called Whiteman to ask him what this was all about, the bandleader managed to persuade the twenty-five-year-old composer to write something scored for piano and orchestra for his concert, even if it wasn’t a concerto in name. Shortly thereafter, with time quickly running out, he offered the services of his band arranger, Ferde Grofé, to help with the orches- tration. Gershwin wrote most of the piece on an upright piano in the family apartment on West 110th Street, where Grofé dropped by, almost daily, as he later recalled, “for more pages of George’s masterpiece, which he origi- nally composed in two-piano form.”

D espite the rushed, haphazard cir- cumstances of its composition, Rhapsody in Blue is a more carefully

designed and thematically tight work than is often claimed. The first fourteen measures, from the clarinet’s opening wail to the jaunty, accented theme in the winds that shortly follows, contain the raw material for much of the piece. Nearly two-thirds of the way through, a big piano cadenza—Gershwin improvised, playing from blank pages—leads to the famous main slow theme. With a final stretch of brilliance and panache, Gershwin brings to a close what is arguably the most beloved fifteen minutes in American music.

COMPOSED1924, for two pianos

orchestrated for jazz ensemble by Ferde Grofé

later revised and reorchestrated for symphony orchestra

FIRST PERFORMANCEFebruary 12, 1924, New York City. The composer as soloist

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJune 14, 1933, Auditorium Theatre. The composer as soloist, William Daly conducting

July 25, 1936, Ravinia Festival. The composer as soloist, William Daly conducting

March 20, 1954, Orchestra Hall. Leonard Pennario as soloist, George Schick conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESMay 23, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Cyrus Chestnut as soloist, David Robertson conducting

July 29, 2014, Ravinia Festival. Kevin Cole as soloist, James Conlon conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, two saxophones, three horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, banjo, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME15 minutes

CSO RECORDING1990. James Levine conducting from the keyboard. Deutsche Grammophon

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra first performed music by Gershwin—with the composer as soloist in his Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue—at the Auditorium Theatre on June 14, 1933. The concert was given as part of the Century of Progress, the World’s Fair celebrating the centennial of the city of Chicago.

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Antonín DvořákBorn September 8, 1841, Mühlhausen, Bohemia (now Nelahozeves, Czech Republic).Died May 1, 1904, Prague.

Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70

COMPOSED1884–March 17, 1885

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 22, 1885; London, England. The composer conducting

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 9 & 10, 1894, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

July 9, 1968, Ravinia Festival. Stanisław Skrowaczewski conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJune 4, 5 & 6, 2009, Orchestra Hall. Sir Mark Elder conducting

August 8, 2012, Ravinia Festival. James Conlon conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME38 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1967. Carlo Maria Giulini conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 9: A Tribute to Carlo Maria Giulini)

1984. James Levine conducting. RCA

To the late nineteenth century, Dvořák was the composer of five sympho-nies. His first four symphonies, never published during his lifetime, were unknown. This powerful D minor work was published in 1885 as Symphony no. 2,

simply because it was the second symphony by Dvořák to come off the printer’s press, even though it was the seventh to come from the composer’s pen. Dvořák, who was perhaps the only one capable of setting the record straight, didn’t, when, at the top of this manuscript, he wrote Symphony no. 6—discounting a first symphony that was never returned from an orchestral competition and thus presumed lost.

Like his nineteenth-century colleagues Schubert and Bruckner, Dvořák has been good to musicol-ogists, who sometimes make a living straightening up after the fact. The music itself—what was known of it—has long been loved by the public. But only with the publication of Dvořák’s first four symphonies in the 1950s (the long-lost First Symphony was rediscovered after the composer’s death and performed for the first time in 1936) did we begin to use the current numbering. By now, even musicians who grew up knowing this symphony as no. 2 have come to accept it as no. 7.

In the spring of 1884, Dvořák went to London at the invitation of the Royal Philharmonic Society, whose members received him with enthusiasm and affection. After he returned home in June, the society elected him a member and commissioned a new symphony, but Dvořák waited six months before he began to work on it.

I n a sense, this symphony was born the day Dvořák first heard Brahms’s new Third Symphony, and that was the music that

still filled his head when he sat down that December to begin sketching. Johannes Brahms had already played a decisive role in Dvořák’s life, lending support and encouragement, and persuading his own publisher, Fritz Simrock, to take him on. Although Brahms insisted their admiration was reciprocal, history has tended to hear Brahms’s voice in Dvořák’s music, and not the other way around.

The work on the new symphony went quickly—three months from the first sketch to the finished product—but not smoothly. The sketches are a muddle; many pages are incom-plete, as if Dvořák did not know how to con-tinue. In February 1885, he wrote to Simrock, informing him of the new symphony and mentioning Brahms’s name in the same breath: “I don’t want to let Brahms down.” By March 17 the work was done, and Brahms could not possi-bly have been disappointed with the result.

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T his is arguably Dvořák’s finest sym-phony. Nearly a century ago, when the esteemed British writer and critic

Donald Tovey ranked this D minor symphony with Schubert’s great C major symphony and the four by Brahms, it was not because of Dvořák’s indebtedness to either of those composers, but because he truly thought this work worthy of that exalted comparison. The D minor sym-phony not only represents a mastery of form comparable to that of Schubert or Brahms—and new to Dvořák—but it searches for a deeper meaning than audiences had come to expect from the composer of popular Slavonic dances.

Fritz Simrock greeted this new symphony—as most of Dvořák’s music—with the transparent disappointment that it was not another set of Slavonic dances which he could quickly print and easily sell, making both him and Dvořák richer. Dvořák, who understood that music brings its own riches, was irritated that Simrock was unmoved by the symphony’s great success at its London premiere under the composer’s direction. And so the two were set for a confrontation. That came soon enough when Simrock offered a mere three thousand marks for the symphony (which Dvořák considered an insult), and then insisted

that the printed score bear the German Anton rather than the Czech Antonín, which the com-poser took as a personal attack on his nationality. Ultimately they compromised on Ant.—the neutral abbreviation saving not only space but a friendship as well.

Dvořák said that the main theme of the first movement came to him while he stood on the platform waiting for the train from Pest to arrive at the State Station, an unlikely inspiration made more likely by the knowledge that Dvořák spent hours of his adult life monitoring the progress of trains in rail yards wherever he lived. (When he moved to New York, he loved watching the Boston trains come in.) The second theme—in B-flat, and far too lovely to have been launched by a locomotive—leads to a magnificent and generous paragraph. The development of these materials is short and densely packed. The move-ment ends not with the tragic power which it has so brilliantly harnessed, but in a sudden demise.

The second movement is remarkable not only for the quality of its material, but also for the way it unfolds, freely and unpredictably. This is very rich music, both intimate and open-hearted; sweeping lyricism gives way to brief, emerging comments from the horn, the clarinet, or the oboe. The Largo of the later New World Symphony may always be more famous and more easily remembered, for it is a big and gorgeous tune, but Dvořák never surpassed the achieve-ment of this movement.

Many scherzos are dance music, but this one nearly lifts an audience to its feet—and sometimes prompts a bit of podium activity as well—with its lively and infectious rhythm. There is also the added excitement of an accom-paniment that suggests two beats to the bar and a melody that wants three. With the finale, tragedy reappears, rules a number of themes, dictates a particularly stormy episode midway through, and admits a turn to D major only at the very end.

Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.

Dvořák’s family shortly after their arrival in New York

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