Program

Wednesday, April 3, 2013, at 6:30 (Afterwork Masterworks, performed with no intermission)

Sakari oramo ConductorYuja Wang Piano

Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26Nielsen Symphony No. 5, Op. 50

Thursday, April 4, 2013, at 8:00Friday, April 5, 2013, at 1:30Saturday, April 6, 2013, at 8:00

Sakari oramo ConductorYuja Wang Piano

DeanAmpitheatreFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

ProkofievPiano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26Andante—AllegroAndantinoAllegro ma non troppo

YujA WANg

INtermISSIoN

NielsenSymphony No. 5, Op. 50Tempo giusto—Adagio non troppoAllegro—Presto—Andante un poco tranquillo—Allegro

ONe HuNdred TWeNTY-SeCONd 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 appearance of Yuja Wang is endowed in part by the John Ward Seabury Distinguished Soloist Fund.The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9 FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterwork 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

2

Ampitheatre, Scene for orchestra

Brett DeanBorn October 23, 1941, Brisbane, Australia.

Like many composers, Brett Dean is a highly accomplished

performer—on viola, a particular favorite of composers over time—but few have spent such a large portion of their career playing in one of the world’s great orchestras. In 1985, soon after completing his studies in his native Australia—he graduated from the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in 1982, then moved to Germany to study with Wolfram Christ—Dean became a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Dean began to compose in 1988, initially working on radio projects and largely improvised film music. He later said that it was the combination of his “day job” in the Berlin Philharmonic viola section and his early apprenticeship in electronic music studios and

live improv clubs in Berlin in the late 1980s that formed his identity as a composer—an immersion in the Western canon balanced by an openness to new sonic worlds. “The orchestral years taught me about shape, breath, gesture, energy,” he once said, “whereas improvising and playing around with embryonic ideas in a studio allowed me to discover my own way of handling musical material.”

In the 1990s, Dean began to make his name as a composer, particularly through worldwide performances of the ballet One of a Kind (a work for the Nederlands Dans Theater, choreographed by the legendary Jiří Kylián) and the clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music, which won an award from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. Dean is attracted

ComPoSeD2000

FIrSt PerFormaNCejune 16, 2000; Brisbane, Australia

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performances of music by Brett dean.

INStrumeNtatIoNtwo flutes, two piccolos and alto flute, two oboes and hecklephone, clarinet, two bass clarinets and contrabass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabas-soon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percus-sion, harp, strings

aPProxImate PerFormaNCe tIme11 minutes

3

to a wide range of subjects: Carlo, for strings, sampler, and tape, was inspired by the music of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo; his Pastoral Symphony, a successor of sorts to Beethoven’s, provides a contemporary take on the relationship between man-made music and the sounds of nature. A new work, The Last Days of Socrates, will be premiered later this month by his old orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic (with bass John Tomlinson and the Rundfunkchor Berlin), under Sir Simon Rattle. Although Dean left the Berlin Philharmonic in 1999, after fifteen years, that experience has continued to shape the music he writes. He recently said that playing Elektra in the pit with the Berlin orchestra was a life-changing moment for him as a composer, and that the way Strauss made the orchestra the chief protagonist in the drama strongly influenced his own opera Bliss, based on the novel by Peter Carey, which premiered in 2010 in Sydney.

In 2009, Dean was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition—joining the company of Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, and Witold Lutosławski—for his violin concerto, The Lost Art of Letter Writing. Dean says he found inspiration in the fact that e-mail and text messaging have left the traditional hand-written letter behind. Each movement of the score is based on an excerpt from a letter written in the nine-teenth century, with the solo violin playing the role of both the letter writers (Johannes Brahms, Vincent van Gogh, Hugo Wolf, and

Australian outlaw Ned Kelly) and the recipients.

Dean’s Ampitheatre, commis-sioned by Symphony Australia,

is a dramatic scene for large orches-tra. Dean comments:

It is in one (essentially slow) movement, and takes its title from the opening of German author Michael Ende’s mes-merizing children’s book Momo, in which he describes the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheatre situated on the outskirts of a big, modern city. Amphitheatres came in

The cover for Michael Ende’s 1973 novel, Momo

4

all shapes and sizes; magnifi-cent ones in major cities were fitted out with lavish golden carpets and sunshades, massive columns, and statues. Simple theatres in smaller towns made do with straw roofing and modest decorations. They were a reflection of the people and communities that built them—the main thing was that everyone had somewhere to gather in order to experience theatre, to satisfy their hunger for stories and spectacles, to be part of their culture.

The other unifying factor amongst most of these round or oval structures, whether large or small, was that they were made of massive blocks of stone. The initial musical idea in this orchestral amphitheatre, an oscillating chord change first heard in the brass, becomes the stone blocks upon which this piece’s structure is built. Through a change of colors, from the low brass to winds, strings, and then back to brass, we take in different perspectives

of the same object, as if taking a walk around its circumference.

The other motivic group that takes on more significance as the piece progresses consists of distant, heralding trumpet fanfares, reminiscences of past glories that took place in the old stone walls, momentarily replacing the stillness of time frozen. Like the tiered seat-ing of these ancient arenas, radiating outwards from center stage, the layers of sound and textures unfold and expand. In this process, the fanfares become increasingly larger than life and eventually almost grotesque in their directness.

However, as quickly as these phantasies have erupted, so too do they dissipate, becoming once again little more than distant echoes of a bygone age. As Ende describes it, the day-dreaming tourist returns to his senses, takes a photo, and departs from the scene. “Then stillness is reinstated to the stony roundness.”

5

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, op. 26

This is the piano concerto Prokofiev introduced to the world

on this stage in 1921. Prokofiev’s ties to Chicago go back to the summer of 1917, when local businessman Cyrus McCormick, Jr., the farm machine magnate, met the twenty-six-year-old composer Sergei Prokofiev while on a business trip to Russia. Prokofiev was unknown to McCormick, but the composer recognized the distin-guished American’s name at once, because the estate his father had managed owned several impressive International Harvester machines. McCormick expressed an interest in the composer’s new music, and he eventually agreed to pay for the printing of his unpublished Scythian Suite. He also encouraged Prokofiev to come to the United States, and asked him to send some of his scores to Chicago Symphony music director Frederick Stock.

McCormick wrote to Stock at once, saying that Prokofiev “would be glad to come to Chicago and bring some of his symphonies if his expenses were paid. But not know-ing myself the value of his music, I did not feel justified in taking the risk of bringing him here.” After Stock received Prokofiev’s scores, he replied to McCormick: “There is no question in my mind as to the talent of young Serge.” Although Stock at first doubted that it was feasible to bring the Russian composer to the U.S. right away, Prokofiev (or Prokofieff, as the U.S. press spelled his name at the time) made his debut with the Chicago Symphony the following season, playing his First Piano Concerto under Stock’s baton and conducting the orchestra himself in the American premiere of his Scythian Suite in Orchestra Hall in December 1918.

Sergei ProkofievBorn April 23, 1891, Sontsovka, Ukraine.Died March 5, 1953, Moscow.

ComPoSeD1927–1931

FIrSt PerFormaNCeOctober 16, 1921, Chicago. The composer as soloist; Frederick Stock conducting

other CSo PerFormaNCeS WIth the ComPoSer aS SoloIStjanuary 21 & 22, 1937, Orchestra Hall. Hans Lange conducting

moSt reCeNt CSo PerFormaNCeSMay 18, 1991, Orchestra Hall. Olli Mustonen, piano; daniel Barenboim conducting

july 26, 2009, ravinia Festival. Lang Lang, piano; Christoph eschenbach conducting

INStrumeNtatIoNsolo piano, two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three

trombones, timpani, bass drum, castanets, tambou-rine, cymbals, strings

aPProxImate PerFormaNCe tIme28 minutes

CSo reCorDINg1960. Van Cliburn, piano; Walter Hendl conducting. rCA

6

“The appearance here of the young Russian, Sergei Prokofieff, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra con-cert was the most startling and, in a sense, important musical event that has happened in this town for a long time,” wrote Henriette Weber in the Herald and Examiner. “Personally he is middle-sized and blond, some-what gangling about the arms and shoulders, and entirely business-like in demeanor,” reported the Journal. “His business is his music, while he is on the stage, and he would seem to resent even the time that it takes to bow.” The music itself caused quite a stir. “Russian Genius Displays Weird Harmonies” was the headline in the American. “The music was of such savagery, so brutally barbaric,” Henriette Weber wrote, “that it seemed almost grotesque to see civilized men, in modern dress with modern instruments, perform-ing it. By the same token it was big, sincere, true.” The public loved it. “Every man and woman there reacted to it,” Weber continued, “and Prokofieff was given a thundering ovation that at least in a slight degree expressed the tumultuous emotions he inspired.”

In Chicago, McCormick intro-duced Prokofiev to Cleofonte Campanini, the director of the Chicago Opera, who asked the composer if he had written an opera. When Prokofiev explained that he had, but that the score for The Gambler was sitting on the shelf of the Mariinsky Theater back in Russia and would be difficult to obtain, Campanini hit on the idea of commissioning him to write a new opera for the Chicago company. That January, Prokofiev signed a contract

to produce an operatic version of The Love for Three Oranges, based on the Russian adaptation of Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte fairy tale, to be premiered in Chicago. By March, citrus grow-ers in Florida and California were fighting over promotion rights. (One stated: “This succulent and healthful brand inspired Prokofiev and is used exclusively by him in this opera and at home.”)

Prokofiev expected to be back in Chicago the following winter for the premiere of The Love for Three Oranges. But while rehearsals were under way that December, Campanini suddenly died; the premiere was postponed, first for one year, and then, because of financial disagreements, for yet another. Prokofiev finally returned to Chicago late in October of 1921 to oversee the production of his opera. On December 16, Prokofiev took a break from rehearsals at the Auditorium Theatre to appear again at Orchestra Hall, playing his brand new Piano Concerto no. 3 with the Chicago Symphony. Two weeks later, the opera opened. Both were warmly applauded and recognized as scores of significance, although, in the end, the great Third Piano Concerto has proven less perishable than the Oranges.

Although Prokofiev would later call these his two “American”

pieces, the piano concerto was written in the French countryside, on the coast of Brittany during a summer holiday in 1921, an unlikely pastoral setting for such a bustling, urban piece. Like his first two piano concertos, the work was written

7

for his own hands, formidable and fearless at the keyboard. Prokofiev took his first piano lessons from his pianist mother; his great technical ability was apparent at an early age. He gravitated to the most challeng-ing works; his concerto repertoire included Beethoven’s Emperor, the first two by Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky’s popular First. (He played earlier, classical works with his own “improvements.”) In 1937, just before Prokofiev’s last American tour, Francis Poulenc still marveled at how his “long, spatulate fingers held the keyboard as a racing car holds the track.”

Prokofiev’s first two piano concertos, both written before he finished his degree at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, are bold, challenging scores. The flamboyant first (1911) was Prokofiev’s earliest controversial work (he later called it “footballish”); the ultramodern second (1913) left listeners “frozen with fright, hair standing on end,” according to a contemporary critic. Prokofiev had long wanted to write a new concerto, and had, in fact, been collecting material for years. This would remain his characteristic compositional method—making sketches as ideas came to him, at any hour of the day or night, and saving them until they found a place in his music.

The Third Piano Concerto incor-porates sketches gathered over a

decade. The earliest ideas date from 1911. The E minor theme that opens the second movement was sketched in 1913, and was intended from the start as the basis of a set of varia-tions. In 1916–17, Prokofiev wrote

down the two main ideas with which he would ultimately begin the piece, as well as two variations on the 1913 theme. A string quartet begun and abandoned en route to the United States in 1918 provided two themes for the finale. So when Prokofiev sat down to begin his new concerto during the summer of 1921, he had already written most of important thematic material.

The score is a remarkable achieve-ment, combining the brilliant, edgy momentum of Prokofiev’s previous music with a haunting new lyri-cism. All three movements benefit from the interplay of both elements; the balance is carefully judged: the second movement is calm with fiery interludes, the finale just the oppo-site. The forms are essentially those that have ruled piano concertos since Mozart’s day—the first movement is a sonata-allegro, the second a theme and variations, the last a rondo—but the sonority and style are what we now recognize as Prokofiev’s own.

The Chicago premiere went well. The reviews were cordial but largely uncomprehending (“a plum pudding without the plums”). The audi-ence was highly enthusiastic. The concerto quickly became Prokofiev’s calling card; within a year he played it in London, Paris, and New York. (“In Chicago there was less understanding than support,” the composer later recalled. “In New York there was neither.”) It was the first work he recorded (in 1932)—a blazing document of his fabled style and technique; and it was destined to become his most popular piano concerto (he would complete two others) and a favorite landmark of twentieth-century music.

8

Symphony No. 5, op. 50

Carl Nielsen’s father, a house painter, played the violin. As a

young boy, Carl worked earnestly to master his father’s three-quarter-size fiddle until the day he spotted an upright mahogany piano in his uncle’s house. He marveled at the individual notes, set “in a long shining row before my eyes. Not only could I hear them, I could see them,” he later remembered. His romance with the violin cooled temporarily in favor of the piano, with its long expanse of keys. But by the time he entered the Copenhagen Conservatory in 1884 as a scholarship student, the violin was his chosen instrument. After graduating two years later, he sup-ported himself by playing violin at the Tivoli Gardens, and in 1899 he joined the Royal Orchestra.

Nielsen’s earliest known composition—other than those

he made up as a three-year-old by playing melodies on different sizes of logs from the woodpile outside his house—was a polka for violin. (His father, never suspecting the direction his son’s music would take, complained that it was too synco-pated.) Most of his first works were scored for string instruments; even before entering the conservatory, he composed several string quartets, a violin sonata, and a duet for two vio-lins (all still unpublished). His offi-cial op. 1 is a Little Suite for strings written in 1888; that same year, he also composed a string quintet.

Then, in 1892, with hardly any experience writing for orchestra, Nielsen completed his first sym-phony. (He had tried to compose a symphony in 1888, but gave up after one movement.) Although the work is wild and uneven (one reviewer compared Nielsen to “a

Carl NielsenBorn June 9, 1865, Sortelung, Denmark.Died October 3, 1931, Copenhagen, Denmark.

ComPoSeD1920–january 15, 1922

FIrSt PerFormaNCejanuary 24, 1922, Copenhagen. The com-poser conducting

FIrSt CSo PerFormaNCedecember 14, 1967, Orchestra Hall. Sixten ehrling conducting

moSt reCeNt CSo PerFormaNCeOctober 9, 2004, Orchestra Hall. Paavo järvi conducting

INStrumeNtatIoNthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabas-soon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle, snare drum, tambourine, celesta, strings

aPProxImate PerFormaNCe tIme35 minutes

9

child playing with dynamite”), it reveals many of the hallmarks of the composer’s mature and highly individual style—a driving rhyth-mic energy and an original sense of harmonic progression—and sug-gests that Nielsen was a born sym-phonist. For the next three decades, as he slowly turned out five more symphonies, this appeared to be his ideal medium.

It was Nielsen’s Third Symphony (the so-called Sinfonia espansiva), written in 1910 and 1911, that was the breakthrough—his first work that reveals greatness rather than promise. And it was his Fourth (The Inextinguishable), composed during World War I, that came the closest to giving him a runaway success (it’s still the most often performed of the six symphonies). His Fifth Symphony, premiered six years after the Fourth, is arguably his greatest work in the form.

The Fifth Symphony has no sub-title, but its “subject” is familiar

Nielsen territory. As Nielsen said in a newspaper interview published the day of the premiere,

My first symphony was name-less, too. But then came The Four Temperaments, Espansiva, and The Inextinguishable, actu-ally just different names for the same thing, the only thing that music can express when all is said and done: the rest-ing powers as opposed to the active ones. If I were to find a name for this, my new fifth symphony, it would express something similar.

Although Nielsen failed to find a suitable title—“the one word that is at the same time characteristic and not too pretentious”—the music itself clearly defines a drama of energy and release. (When pressed, Nielsen suggested the image of a stone being rolled up a hill, where it lies still—“the energy is tied up in it”—and then kicked down the other side.) After writing four sympho-nies divided into the four standard movements, here Nielsen opts for a two-part design—“the first, which begins slowly and calmly, and the second, more active.” (Nielsen wasn’t yet done with traditional symphonic form—his sixth and final symphony reverts to a four-movement layout.)

Both of Nielsen’s two move-ments are further subdivided into contrasting sections. The first movement begins uncertainly, with wandering wind melodies over static, obsessive string figures; turns more sinister (pounding timpani and an insistent snare drum add to the Hitchcock-like suspense); and then dissolves into a spacious, heartfelt adagio. The snare drum returns, with even greater force, at the climax of the Adagio, nearly upstaging the entire orchestra—it’s one of Nielsen’s signature con-frontations, like the battle of the timpani in The Inextinguishable. The second movement is more impetuous, with a number of gear shifts along the way; it never loses momentum, even when it slows down for a gentle andante episode, and it never lacks energy.

In Nielsen’s works, the conflict between keys and the ultimate

10

journey away from home base creates the drama of each piece. Many of his symphonies, like some of Mahler’s, don’t end in the key with which they begin. As Robert Simpson, the composer’s biographer, writes, Nielsen believed “that a sense of achievement is best conveyed by the firm establish-ment of a new key”—in contrast to the policy of composers from Bach to Shostakovich. In the Fifth Symphony, the harmonic itiner-ary is unusually ambitious. The piece begins ambiguously, and Nielsen takes his time settling

on F major as his starting point. The second movement opens in B major, the opposite side of the harmonic world—technically, it’s as far removed from F major as possible—and ends in E-flat major, a key scarcely touched in the opening movement. The entire symphony is a grand adventure—a drama of glimpsed horizons, circuitous routes, and unexpected destinations.

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

The use of still or video cameras and recording devices is prohibited in Orchestra Hall.

Latecomers will be seated during designated program pauses. PLease nOTe: some programs do not allow for latecomers to be seated in the hall.

Please use perfume, cologne, and all other scented products sparingly, as many patrons are sensitive to fragrance.

Please turn off or silence all personal electronic devices (pagers, watches, telephones, digital assistants).

Please note that symphony Center is a smoke-free environment.

Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

Note: Fire exits are located on all levels and are for emergency use only. The lighted exit sign nearest your seat is the shortest route outdoors. Please walk—do not run—to your exit and do not use elevators for emergency exit.Volunteer ushers provided by The Saints—Volunteers for the Performing Arts (www.saintschicago.org)

Symphony Center Information

© 2

013

Chi

cago

Sym

phon

y O

rche

stra