Program

Friday, June 22, 2012, at 8:00 (Symphony Center Presents)Saturday, June 23, 2012, at 8:00Sunday, June 24, 2012, at 3:00

riccardo muti Conductorrobert Chen Violin

PaganiniViolin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 6Allegro maestosoAdagioRondo: Allegro spiritoso

RObeRt CheN

IntermIssIon

BrucknerSymphony No. 6 in A MajorMaestosoAdagio: Very solemnScherzo: Not fastFinale: Moving, but not too fast

ONe huNDReD tweNty-FiRSt SeASON

Chicago symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music DirectorPierre Boulez helen Regenstein Conductor emeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

The concerts on June 23 and 24 are generously sponsored by Cindy Sargent.This program is partially supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Comments by PhilliP huSCheR

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Violin Concerto no. 1 in D major, op. 6

nicolò PaganiniBorn October 27, 1782, Genoa, Italy.Died May 27, 1840, Nice, France.

He was the original superstar, and none of our age’s great pop

music idols—not even the Beatles—have matched his extraordinary appeal with the general public. From the day the eleven-year-old Nicolò Paganini played his violin in a Genoese church until he retired from the concert stage more than four decades later in 1834, Paganini was one of the most talked-about figures in European public life. At the height of his career, around 1830, his personal magnetism and astounding virtuosity could only be explained as the result of witchcraft. (His very name, “little pagan,” sug-gested as much.) He was famous for his concert appearance (he dressed in black, from head to toe) and, in a pre-tabloid era, his offstage antics were eagerly followed and discussed

(it was rumored that the fourth string of his violin, which produced an especially glorious tone, had been made from the intestine of his mistress, whom he had murdered).

Several portraits of Paganini, including the famous Delacroix painting, match a description of the great violinist recorded in 1830: a “tall, gaunt figure dressed in old-fashioned black coat-and-tails . . . his right leg, placed forward and bent at the knee, nothing but spirit and bone draped in a loosely flapping suit of clothes.” Only later did his admir-ers learn that everything about his appearance, from his haunted face and exaggerated mannerisms to his disheveled hair and unkempt attire, was carefully calculated for its effect.

ComPoseD1816

FIrst PerFormanCeMarch 31, 1819, Naples, italy

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeJanuary 28, 1910, Orchestra hall. Alexander Sebald, violin; Frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeApril 14, 1984, Orchestra hall. eunice lee, violin; Sir Georg Solti conducting

InstrumentatIonsolo violin, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, one bassoon and one contrabas-soon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, strings

CaDenzaCarl Flesch

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme26 minutes

Cso reCorDIng1962. erik Friedman, violin; walter hendl conducting. RCA

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As a musician, Paganini was one of a kind. His admirers included Berlioz, who called him “a genius, a Titan among the giants”; Schubert, who attended his first Vienna concerts and compared his playing to “the singing of an angel”; and Liszt, who thought his virtuosity “a miracle which the kingdom of art has seen but once,” and decided, virtually overnight, after witness-ing the frenzy of his Paris debut, to take the violinist as a model for his own career (“The Paganini of the piano” became his slogan).

Paganini’s own taste in music was unusually advanced. He admired Beethoven’s late string quartets when they were still dismissed as the feeble works of a deaf man, and he quickly recognized Berlioz’s genius. He was clever enough to ask Berlioz to write him something to play on his newly acquired Stradivarius viola, and then, on receiving the score to Harold in Italy, to know that it was not what his public expected to hear. (He never played the piece, although he gave Berlioz 20,000 francs and thanked him profusely.)

As a violinist, his technique was phenomenal. When he made his Milan debut in 1813, his virtuos-ity was called “inconceivable.” The most famous of his many innova-tions included left-hand pizzicato, the ricochet (where the bow bounces on the string to produce rapid staccato notes), and double-stop harmonics. There seemed to be nothing he could not do with the violin’s four strings, and one of his specialties, which always brought the house down, was a fancy encore played entirely on one string.

Paganini was jealously secretive about his art. When he played a concerto, he refused to allow the orchestra players to hear even a note of his cadenzas until the

performance. (He never wrote his cadenzas down; at these concerts, Robert Chen plays a cadenza by Carl Flesch.) Nobody ever heard him practice—“I have labored enough to acquire my talent; it is time that I rest,” he explained—although an Englishman is said to have followed Paganini around Europe, bribing innkeepers to give him the room next door. (Once he peeked through the keyhole long enough to see Paganini take his

Nicolò Paganini by Eugène Delacroix, ca. 1831

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violin out of the case and finger it silently for a moment.)

Paganini began to write music when he ran out of demand-ing, showy things to play. As a composer, he has not been taken as seriously in the modern age, even by violinists, as he was in his own time. (Even Fritz Kreisler, the celebrated violinist, had no qualms about playing his own one-movement abridgment of the three-movement Violin Concerto no. 1 that is performed this week.) The one piece of his that is still well-known is the twenty-fourth of his solo violin caprices, which has been lovingly rearranged by Rachmaninov, Lutosławski, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, among others.

Paganini wrote his First Violin Concerto in 1816. It was an

enormous success at the premiere in Naples in 1819, and it was followed, in short order, by another four. (An earlier concerto, discovered and published only in 1973, is now

known, inevitably but mislead-ingly, as no. 6.) Despite Kreisler’s intervention, Paganini’s First Violin Concerto has three movements, the first in a nearly uninterrupted display of virtuoso fireworks for the soloist. The second, a lyrical Adagio, is a wonderfully expressive bel canto aria. (Rossini, the most popular opera composer of the era, is reported to have commented that if Paganini ever started writing operas, “we’d all be in trouble.” Rossini may well have attended the Naples premiere of this concerto, since he had introduced his latest opera, Ermione, there just four days earlier. Paganini and Rossini were longtime friends; the great violinist-composer even honored Rossini by writing variations on three popular arias from his operas.) When the German poet Rellstab heard Paganini play the Adagio from this concerto later in Leipzig, he said, “I have never heard anyone weep like that in my life.” The finale dem-onstrates that Paganini specialty: showmanship with substance.

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symphony no. 6 in a major

In February 1899, more than two years after Bruckner’s death,

Gustav Mahler led the first com-plete performance of Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. The concert was a triumph. Accepting the rapturous applause, Mahler surely remem-bered an awful night twenty-two years earlier, when the members of the Vienna Philharmonic begrudgingly played Bruckner’s Third Symphony under its com-poser’s baton. The audience jeered and whistled, dwindling to just two dozen people by the end. The orchestra members fled at the final bar, leaving Bruckner alone onstage to face the few survivors. Mahler, then seventeen years old and a student at the University of Vienna,

was among those who remained to cheer.

That night marked a new low point for Bruckner, who was extremely insecure and had already known several crippling bouts of depression. This was merely the latest blow in his dealings with the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic, who had rejected his first two symphonies as unplayable.

It was two years before Bruckner recovered from the Vienna fiasco and found the courage to begin a new series of works, among them the Sixth Symphony. In the mean-time, the situation with the Vienna Philharmonic eased somewhat, and his Fourth Symphony was given a successful premiere in 1881. But it was still a great day for the com-poser when the orchestra agreed to

anton BrucknerBorn September 4, 1824, Ansfelden, near Linz, Austria.Died October 11, 1896, Vienna, Austria.

ComPoseD1879–1881

FIrst PerFormanCeFebruary 26, 1899, Vienna. Gustav Mahler conducting

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeMarch 22, 1951, Orchestra hall. Rafael Kubelík conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeApril 17, 1999, Orchestra hall. Christoph eschenbach conducting

InstrumentatIontwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme54 minutes

Cso reCorDIngs1977. Daniel barenboim conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

1979. Sir Georg Solti conducting. london (audio and video)

A 1982 performance with Rafael Kubelík conducting is included on From the Archives, vol. 7.

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play two movements—the Adagio and the scherzo—from his new Sixth Symphony in February 1883. Bruckner was so excited that he showed up at the dress rehearsal wearing unmatched shoes.

Brahms came to the concert and applauded enthusiastically. The famous critic Eduard Hanslick, however, sat “calm and motion-less, cold as a sphinx,” according to an observer, and wrote a char-acteristically devastating review. The powerful Hanslick—he once wrote, no doubt with pleasure, “whom I wish to destroy shall be destroyed”—had already dismissed Bruckner as a follower of Richard Wagner. (Bruckner entered the Brahms–Wagner debate when he dedicated his Third Symphony to Wagner.)

Two days after the performance of the two middle movements of his Sixth Symphony, Bruckner learned of Wagner’s death. This was a great personal loss—it was a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1862 that had given him the courage to write his first important music at the age of forty. Although his condolence note to Wagner’s widow Cosima is shockingly inarticulate (a couple of stock phrases followed by “etc., etc.”), the magnificent Adagio of the Seventh Symphony that he wrote in Wagner’s memory shows the real depth of his feelings. Bruckner was always ill at ease with words and often uncomfort-able (if not flatly embarrassing) in his dealings with people. But alone with his music paper, he said things of eloquence and extraordi-nary insight.

In his essay on the Sixth Symphony, Donald Tovey urges us to clear our minds and treat this “as a kind of music we have never heard before.” That was imperative fifty years ago, when Tovey was writing, for Bruckner’s canvases were not highly regarded then, but even today his music is all too easily misunderstood. Like all his sym-phonies, Bruckner’s Sixth accepts the model posed by Beethoven’s Ninth: an expansive first movement followed by a serene and spacious adagio, a scherzo in sonata form, and a gigantic finale that gathers many threads together in a new light. Even Bruckner’s opening pays homage to the start of Beethoven’s great work, as melody gradually pokes through the mist.

Bruckner does not begin with Beethoven’s low, tremulous chords, but with the high, repeated notes of the violins, like a message in Morse code. Had Beethoven spent countless hours in the organ loft at mass, he too might have written a big theme like the one Bruckner now gives the low strings, based on the old Phrygian church mode (the white notes on the piano, starting on E). Bruckner’s tune is in A major, but in the first phrase he writes an unexpected B-flat, and then F- and G-naturals, which are not part of the A major scale. So, from the start, Bruckner questions his own assertion of A major at the top of the score’s first page.

The first movement is designed on a vast scale governed by sonata form, which implies a dynamic process about going somewhere and the pressing need to return.

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But Bruckner moves at a leisurely pace; his temperament is contem-plative rather than emphatic, and he is seldom in a hurry. Bruckner’s first theme is a slow melody held together by the insistent hammer-ing of the opening motif—repeated a total of ninety-two times (which he surely knew, since he was obsessed with counting everything from the measures in his scores to the municipal statues he passed on his way to a rehearsal). After that, he introduces a lovely flowing theme, which unfolds in a long suc-cession of four-bar phrases. There are brass-dominated outbursts throughout, as well as times when the music stands still and only the stirrings of the flute can be heard. There is a wrenching moment at the climax, when the opening material reenters in E-flat (the flip side of A) and then drops midphrase into A major. The timpani enters at that point—fff, with the opening rhythm—to mark the significance of the event.

The great Adagio begins with a broad theme in the strings alone, answered by the heartbreaking sighs of the oboe. Bruckner’s deeply expressive second theme conveys musically what words cannot. “Listen to it with reverence,” Tovey writes, “for the composer meant what he said, and he is speaking of sacred things.” What follows is a funeral march of a chamber-music delicacy that surely was not lost on Mahler. Bruckner moves slowly but with mastery, writing in large paragraphs and conclud-ing with a drawn-out coda that passes through moments of terrible

dissonance before the various strands finally resolve.

Bruckner’s scherzos are not really social dances, it has been said, but dances of the elements. They are most easily remembered for their brilliant, highly repetitive cadences, full of brass and thunder, but here there is much delicate and imaginative scoring as well. The trio effectively combines a pizzicato opening with hunting horns and a gentle benediction from the strings.

Tovey points out that Bruckner “is in no greater hurry at the end of a symphony than at the begin-ning.” This finale unfolds slowly and deliberately; each theme begins hesitantly, and each time the brass advocate a more decisive approach. Midway through, the melancholy oboe sighs from the Adagio return; almost at once they are swept up in Bruckner’s contrapuntal web (and eventually overcome by the force of the full orchestra). Just before the end, there is one last quiet moment when the winds try to rekindle interest in an earlier theme, but it is too late. Finally, the finale theme comes face to face with the main theme of the first movement, and we realize that their union was preordained from the start.

Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. ©

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