PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON

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

The concert on June 4 is made possible by a generous gift from the Zell Family Foundation.

These performances are made possible in part by a generous gift from the estates of Maurice and Hynda Gamze.

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

Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, June 4, 2015, at 8:00Saturday, June 6, 2015, at 8:00

Ludovic Morlot ConductorDenis Kozhukhin Piano

GershwinAn American in Paris

RavelPiano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major(In one movement)

DENIS KOZHUKHIN

INTERMISSION

StravinskyJeu de cartes, Ballet in Three DealsDeal 1—Deal 2—Deal 3

RavelLa valse

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

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

An American in Paris

George Gershwin’s first musical memory was of an automatic piano in a penny arcade on 125th Street playing Anton Rubinstein’s Melody in F. One of those rare pieces that had become a popular classic, it gave Gershwin the idea at an

early age that serious and commercial music could be one and the same. Gershwin’s own music is so popular today that it’s hard to remember his classical roots. As a teenager, he attended recitals by celebrity soloists such as Josef Lhevinne and Efrem Zimbalist, and he kept a scrapbook of photos of big-name composers, from Liszt and Wagner to Busoni. He played piano in the Beethoven Society Orchestra at Public School 63, and he studied music theory as well as piano. Even after George quit school at fifteen to become “probably the youngest piano pounder ever employed in Tin Pan Alley,” he didn’t forget his greater aspirations.

In the early twenties, while Gershwin was turning out a steady stream of hits (and making the kind of money that is unheard of in the classi-cal music business), he was more determined than ever to write serious music that was equally pop-ular. The historic premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, at

New York’s Aeolian Theater in 1924, announced to the music world that Gershwin was a far more complex and ambitious musician than a mere songwriter. (And just to confuse matters, that same year Gershwin produced some of his finest songs, including “Fascinating rhythm.”) During the mid-1920s, while he enjoyed the life of a rich celebrity, collecting modern art and moving his family out of their dreary apartment into a five-story townhouse on the upper West Side, Gershwin began to compose a piano concerto, three piano preludes, and this tone poem—a love song to Paris—while still maintaining his roles as pianist, tunesmith, and conductor.

In January 1928, Gershwin accepted an invita-tion to visit friends in Paris. Recognizing the need for a change from the frenetic New York scene—he currently had two hit shows, Funny Face and Rosalie, running simultaneously—Gershwin immediately started thinking about a “rhapsodic ballet,” which he quickly titled An American in Paris. By the time he and his brother Ira boarded a steamer for Europe on March 9, George had already sketched the work in versions for one and two pianos. Once in Paris, he continued to work on the score, and he spent one entire afternoon shopping the auto supply stores on the Grande Armée in search of the ideal car horns for the traffic scene he had in mind. (He took four horns home with him for the New York premiere.)

COMPOSED1928

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 13, 1928, New York City

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJune 14, 1933, Auditorium Theatre. William Daly conducting (Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress International Exposition)

July 25, 1936, Ravinia Festival. William Daly conducting

February 13, 1945, Orchestra Hall. Désiré Defauw conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESApril 17, 18, 19 & 22, 2014, Orchestra Hall. Leonard Slatkin conducting

July 11, 2014, Ravinia Festival. Robert Moody conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, three saxophones, two

bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, bells, cymbals, snare drum, taxi horns, tom-toms, triangle, wire brushes, woodblock, xylophone, celesta, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME19 minutes

CSO RECORDING1990. James Levine conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

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When Gershwin arrived in Paris, he was as famous as any living musician. Even in Europe his best songs, such as “The man I love,” “Someone to watch over me,” and “Fascinating rhythm,” were whistled on the street, and Rhapsody in Blue was the most talked about piece of music in a city that had, in the last fifteen years, seen the premieres of The Rite of Spring and Daphnis and Chloe. Gershwin was the toast of the town, and during his visit he met and played the piano for all the resident “seri-ous” composers, from Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Sergei Prokofiev to William Walton. He also renewed his friendship with Maurice Ravel, whom he had just met at a birth-day party for the French composer the previous month in New York City. (That night, Ravel listened while Gershwin played the piano until 4 a.m.; another evening the two went off to hear jazz in Harlem.)

On his way home from Paris, Gershwin stopped in Berlin, where he met Kurt Weill (just weeks before the premiere of The Three Penny Opera), and in Vienna, where he attended the premiere of Ernst Krenek’s jazz-tinged opera, Jonny spielt auf, and met twelve-tone master Alban Berg. At Berg’s invitation, Gershwin attended a performance of Berg’s new Lyric Suite. Afterwards, when the performers insisted, he sat down at the piano and played show tunes and

a few measures of Rhapsody in Blue, to which Berg reportedly responded, equivocally, “Music is music, Mr. Gershwin.” Gershwin became a great admirer of Berg’s work. An autographed photo of the composer later hung on the wall of Gershwin’s Hollywood home, alongside those of Irving Berlin and Jack Dempsey. (After Gershwin’s death, Oscar Levant recalled that the composer often played his recording of the Lyric Suite, and that a piano-vocal score of Berg’s opera Wozzeck was one of his prized possessions.)

B efore the premiere, Gershwin told a reporter that An American in Paris was “written very freely and is the most

modern music I’ve yet attempted.” It was cer-tainly Gershwin’s most accomplished orchestral work to date. For the first time, Gershwin’s trademark jazzy rhythms, bluesy harmonies, and unforgettable melodies are all woven into a big, sophisticated work of symphonic dimensions. By 1928, Gershwin had developed a fine ear for orchestral color and a sense of cinematic panorama. (The title page of the score specifies that the work was “composed and orches-trated” by Gershwin, to counter complaints that Gershwin had left the scoring of Rhapsody in Blue to others.) It is also Gershwin’s first concert work that doesn’t call for a solo piano (the manuscript shows that several passages featuring the instrument were later crossed out).

Despite Gershwin’s claim that he hadn’t written program music (the play-by-play sce-nario printed in the score and often quoted is by Deems Taylor, not Gershwin), the work is unforgettably descriptive, from its opening walk-ing music (think Gene Kelly, Hollywood, 1951) to the car-honking traffic jam. Gershwin did identify the American’s “spasm of homesickness” after too many drinks in a street café, although neither he nor Taylor managed to explain the hot Caribbean rhythm midway through. An American in Paris was a hit at its New York premiere, just months after Gershwin came home. The audi-ence loved it, but the critics roared their disap-proval, betraying their disbelief that a work of concert music could be both popular and ambi-tious, tuneful and complex, fashion-conscious yet unforgettable.

Birthday party honoring Maurice Ravel, New York City, March 7, 1928. From left: conductor Oskar Fried, mezzo-soprano Éva Gauthier, Ravel at the piano, composer-conductor Manoah Leide-Tedesco, and composer George Gershwin

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Maurice RavelBorn March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.

Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major

Had Paul Wittgenstein’s career as a concert pianist gone according to plan, this and several other works for piano and orchestra wouldn’t exist. He was born into one of Vienna’s most remarkable families; his father Karl, a steel, banking, and arms

magnate, and his mother Leopoldine, brought nine children into the world. Paul was the seventh child; the eighth was Ludwig, who became one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century.

The Wittgensteins were an obsessively musical family. Their palatial Viennese home contained seven grand pianos (including two Bösendorfer Imperials), and a grand statue of a nude Beethoven towered over their Musiksaal. Brahms, Strauss, Schoenberg, and Mahler were only a few of the famous guests who climbed the marble staircase to join the family’s celebrated gatherings. All the Wittgensteins “pursued music with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological,” writes Alexander Waugh in his new book about the family, The House of Wittgenstein. Paul studied piano with Theodor Leschetizky and made a successful debut in 1913. Early the next year, he enlisted in the Austrian army. A few months later, while serving on the Russian front, he was shot and seriously

wounded; his right arm was amputated and he was taken prisoner by the Russians.

Being a member of a distinguished family of overachievers and survivors, and raised by a father of forceful determination, Wittgenstein didn’t intend to give up his career as a pianist. (That same oppressive upbringing led his two eldest brothers to commit suicide.) While confined to the invalid ward of a Siberian P.O.W. camp, he began to “play” a Chopin piece on a wooden box with his single hand, inventing ways for five fingers to encompass both melody and harmony.

After the war was over, Wittgenstein took what many would consider his greatest asset, family money, and commissioned more than a dozen pieces for piano left-hand from some of the world’s leading composers, including Maurice Ravel, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Richard Strauss, and Sergei Prokofiev. Wittgenstein wasn’t particularly fond of any of the pieces he commissioned—it’s questionable why, given his conservative tastes, he approached such modern-minded composers to begin with. Shortly before he died he admitted that, of all the composers he asked, he felt closest to the Austrian post-romantic Franz Schmidt.

Wittgenstein eventually came to regard Ravel’s concerto as a masterpiece, but only after living with it for some time and having words with the composer. “It always takes me a while to grow into a difficult work,” Wittgenstein said later. “I suppose Ravel was disappointed, and I was sorry,

COMPOSED1929–30

FIRST PERFORMANCEJanuary 17, 1933; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 15 & 16, 1945, Orchestra Hall. Robert Casadesus as soloist, Désiré Defauw conducting

August 4, 1960, Ravinia Festival. John Browning as soloist, William Steinberg conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESNovember 5, 6, 7 & 10, 2009, Orchestra Hall. Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist, Bernard Haitink conducting

August 7, 2012, Ravinia Festival. Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist, James Conlon conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo piano, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clar-inets, E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet,

two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, woodblock, tam-tam, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME19 minutes

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but I had never learned to pretend. Only much later, after I’d studied the concerto for months, did I become fascinated by it and realize what a great work it was.”

Ravel was already writing a piano concerto—the well-known one in G—when Wittgenstein’s commission arrived. He was intrigued by the challenge and set aside the other concerto for this one almost at once. He studied what little music he knew for left hand, including Saint-Saëns’s six studies and Leopold Goldovsky’s tran-scription of Chopin’s etudes (difficult music to begin with, now rendered virtually unplayable). He probably also knew Brahms’s transcription of J.S. Bach’s famous chaconne for violin and perhaps Scriabin’s Two Pieces for left hand, op. 9. Ravel’s concerto is a real tour de force filled with sounds that regularly suggest two hands at work. Although Wittgenstein criticized the way Ravel played it, it’s not clear that Wittgenstein’s interpretation was significantly better (his two recordings are not completely convincing).

Ravel admitted to his publisher that

planning the two piano concertos simulta-neously was an interesting experience. The one in which I shall appear as the interpreter is a concerto in the truest sense of the word: I mean that it is written very much in the same spirit as those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. . . . The concerto for the left hand alone is very different. It contains many jazz effects, and the writing is not so light. In a work of this kind, it is essential to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands. For the same reason, I resorted to a style that is much nearer to that of the more solemn kind of traditional concerto.

Ravel picked up his jazz effects on his 1928 trip to the United States, where he met bandleader Paul Whiteman and spent several nights visiting jazz clubs in Harlem with George Gershwin. (He also conducted the Chicago Symphony in January and continually complained about

American food.) In a lecture he gave in Houston, he said,

May this national American music of yours embody a great deal of the rich and diverting rhythm of your jazz, a great deal of the emo-tional expression in your blues, and a great deal of the sentiment and spirit characteristic of your popular melodies and songs, worthily deriving from, and in turn contributing to, a noble heritage in music.

T he concerto is one long movement, with an opening slow section followed by an allegro. As Ravel promised, it’s a serious

work, particularly compared to his other con-certo, but hardly solemn. After much orchestral fanfare, the piano enters with a virtuosic cadenza; Ravel described it as an improvisation, although as with all things in Ravel, it’s meticulously worked out. This is followed by music recalling the nights he spent in American jazz clubs. “Only gradually,” Ravel wrote, “is one aware that the jazz episode is actually built up from the themes of the first section.” It’s clear from Ravel’s melodies that he has learned all about blue notes, just as, in La valse and the Valses nobles et senti-mentales, the quintessential Frenchman wrote perfect Viennese waltzes. The final cadenza provides spectacular ripples of arpeggios and a singing melody, all with just five fingers.

Paul Wittgenstein

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Igor StravinskyBorn June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.Died April 6, 1971, New York City.

Jeu de cartes, Ballet in Three Deals

Igor Stravinsky stood on the Orchestra Hall stage in January 1935 to conduct the Chicago premieres of Pulcinella and The Fairy’s Kiss, as well as his popular ballet scores for Petrushka and The Firebird. While he was in America that winter, Stravinsky talked

with Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg about writing a new work for the recently formed American Ballet and its choreographer, George Balanchine. The subject, they all agreed, was Stravinsky’s choice. The composer recalls:

More than a decade prior to the composition of Jeu de cartes [The card game], I became aware of an idea for a ballet in which danc-ers, dressed as playing cards, would perform against a gaming-table backdrop of green baize. I have always been interested in card games (and in cartomancy, too), and I have been a cardplayer all my life, since I first played durachki as a child. While composing Jeu de cartes, poker was a favorite pastime in the rest periods between composition, but the origins of the ballet, in the sense of the attraction of the subject, antedate my knowledge of card games. They are probably to be traced back to childhood holidays at German spas; my first impression of a

German casino, at any rate—the long rows of tables at which people played baccarat or bezique, roulca or faro, as now in the bowels of ocean liners they play bingo—is still a vivid memory. I remember now, too, and remembered when I composed the music, the “trombone” voice with which the master of ceremonies at one of these spas would announce a new game. “Ein neues Spiel, ein neues Glück” [A new game, a new chance], he would say, and the rhythm and instru-mentation of the theme with which each of the three “deals” of my ballet begins are an echo or imitation of the tempo, timbre, and indeed the whole character of that invitation.

Stravinsky wrote The Card Game after he returned to Paris. The score was finished in November 1936 and sent off to Balanchine. By the time Stravinsky came back to America early in 1937, Balanchine had completed the first two deals. Lincoln Kirstein remembered how Stravinsky would “appear punctually at rehears-als and stay on for six hours. In the evenings, he would take the pianist home with him and work further on the tempos.” He sometimes suggested a few well-considered changes in the choreography, and once even wrote a bit of additional music to accommodate Balanchine’s ideas. But he didn’t like the costumes inspired by elaborate tarot card designs: “I insisted that the artist copy some contemporary and very

COMPOSED1936

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 27, 1937; New York City. The composer conducting

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 22, 23 & 27, 1940, Orchestra Hall. The composer conducting

July 22, 1956, Ravinia Festival. Georg Solti conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJune 29, 1971, Ravinia Festival. Bruno Maderna conducting

January 31, February 1 & 2, 2002, Orchestra Hall. Daniele Gatti conducting

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

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME22 minutes

CSO RECORDING1993. Sir Georg Solti. London

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ordinary playing cards from the corner drugstore.”

Stravinsky conducted the first performance, which was given at the old Metropolitan Opera House. The Card Game was a success, both for Stravinsky and Balanchine. Stravinsky claimed to remember little of the evening, “probably because I was conducting and my nose was in the score.” His music didn’t fail to make a favorable impression, with its witty allusions to Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and a particularly cheeky reference to the overture to The Barber of Seville near the end of the third deal. Shortly after the premiere, the composer went to California, where he was, by all accounts, thrilled to meet Charlie Chaplin. The next time Stravinsky came to Chicago, in February 1940, he led the Chicago Symphony in its first perfor-mances of The Card Game.

The official synopsis according to Stravinsky follows.

Igor Stravinsky on The Card Game

T he characters in this ballet are the chief cards in a game of poker, disputed between several players on the green

cloth of a card room. At each deal the situation is complicated by the endless guiles of

the perfidious Joker, who believes himself invincible because of his ability to become any desired card.

During the first deal, one of the players is beaten, but the other two remain with even “straights,” although one of them holds the Joker.

In the second deal, the hand that holds the Joker is victorious, thanks to four Aces who easily beat four Queens.

Now comes the third deal. The action becomes more and more acute. This time it is a struggle between three “flushes.” Although at first victo-rious over one adversary, the Joker, strutting at the head of a sequence of Spades, is beaten by a “Royal Flush” in Hearts. This puts an end to his malice and knavery.

JEU DE CARTES: THE BALLET SCENARIOAlthough the music to Stravinsky’s ballet is continuous, the following break-down of the action may help those who wish to follow the game play by play.

DEAL 1Introduction

Pas d’action

Dance of the Joker

Waltz-Coda

DEAL 2Introduction

March (Hearts and Spades)

Four Solo Variations for the Four Queens (in the order Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Spades)

Variation of the Four Queens (pas de quatre) and Coda

March and Ensemble

DEAL 3Introduction

Waltz-Minuet

Presto (Combat between Spades and Hearts)

Final Dance (Triumph of the Hearts)

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Maurice Ravel

La valse (Choreographic poem for orchestra)

In 1911, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales were intended as a loving tribute to the “useless occupation” of social dancing. By 1919, when he wrote La valse, the world was a changed place, and after the war the public had lost

patience with mere frivolity.La valse is not the piece Ravel planned

to write. In 1906, he began to sketch Wien (Vienna), a tribute to Johann Strauss, Jr. and “. . . a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with which is mingled in my mind the idea of the fantastic whirl of destiny.” This is still true of the music Ravel finally composed in 1919, at the request of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. But fate now made the waltz a bitter reminder of a vanished era and newsreels showed that Vienna was no longer a city in its glory. Due to widespread famine, in 1918 the official daily food rations there were 5.8 ounces of bread, 1.2 ounces of flour, 1.6 ounces of meat, 0.175 ounces of fat, 0.9 ounces of sugar, and 2.45 ounces of potatoes per person. That year, a flu epidemic broke out, killing the painter Gustav Klimt, the architect Otto Wagner, and Freud’s daughter Sophie.

Ravel finished La valse in 1920. It wasn’t what Diaghilev expected and he refused to stage it: “. . . this is not a ballet; it is a portrait of a ballet, it is a painting of a ballet.” The two men never worked together again. Nonetheless, Ravel published the piece as a “choreographic poem for orchestra,” and it was finally danced in Antwerp in 1926 and in Paris in 1928 by Ida Rubinstein’s troupe, which also gave the premiere of Boléro just two days later.

The first page of the score is marked “mou-vement de Valse viennoise.” The music is a masterful evocation of the evasions and collisions between a brilliant surface and dangerous under-currents. Ravel provided a brief scenario:

Swirling clouds afford glimpses, through rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds scatter little by little; one can distinguish an immense hall with a whirling crowd. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortis-simo. An imperial court, about 1855.

COMPOSED1919–20

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 12, 1920; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 9 & 10, 1923. Frederick Stock conducting

July 5, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Ernest Ansermet conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 25, 2010, Ravinia Festival. Christoph Eschenbach conducting

May 23, 2012, Orchestra Hall. David Robertson conducting

CSO PERFORMANCES, THE COMPOSER CONDUCTINGJanuary 20 & 21, 1928, Orchestra Hall

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, three oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, snare drum, castanets, tam-tam, antique cymbals, two harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME13 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1960. Fritz Reiner. CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years)

1967. Jean Martinon. RCA

1976. Sir Georg Solti. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 4: A Tribute to Solti)

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra