Download Anthology of Fantastic Zoology

PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, June 18, 2015, at 8:00
Friday, June 19, 2015, at 1:30
Saturday, June 20, 2015, at 8:00
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Bates
Anthology of Fantastic Zoology
Forest: Twilight—
Sprite
Dusk—
The A Bao A Qu
Nymphs
Night—
The Gryphon
Midnight—
Sirens—
The Zaratan—
Madrugada
World premiere
Commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
INTERMISSION
Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Andante—Allegro con anima
Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza
Waltz: Allegro moderato
Finale: Andante maestoso—Allegro vivace
These performances are sponsored by an anonymous donor in honor of Patricia Dash and Doug Waddell for their
excellence in music education through the Percussion Scholarship Program, now celebrating its twentieth season.
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
Mason Bates
Born January 23, 1978, Richmond, Virginia.
Anthology of Fantastic Zoology
“The task of art,” Jorge
Luis Borges said in an
interview shortly before
his death, “is to transform
what is continuously
happening to us, to
transform all these things
into symbols, into music,
into something which can
last in man’s memory.”
Mason Bates, the Chicago Symphony’s Mead
Composer-in-Residence, discovered Borges in a
Latin American literature course at Columbia
University. “His use of nonfiction prose style
when describing the realm of fantasy and
imagination is unmatched by any writer,” Bates
says today. Bates’s new work, Anthology of
Fantastic Zoology—written for the Chicago
Symphony and Riccardo Muti, to mark the end
of Bates’s residency with the CSO—is a fabulist
concerto for orchestra that was inspired by one of
Borges’s greatest flights of fancy.
Borges’s Manual de zoología fantástica was first
published in 1957, at the time when Borges’s eyesight had deteriorated to the point that he could
no longer read what he was writing. His inner
vision, however, had never been more vivid, as he
described mythical beasts from folklore, legend,
and literature. When an expanded version of the
anthology came out a decade later, under the title
The Book of Imaginary Beings, The New York Times
suggested it was the “skeleton-key to Borges’s
literary imagination.” Although Borges’s writings
have inspired composers before, Bates is the first
to take the anthology as a point of departure.
COMPOSED
2014
These are the world
premiere performances.
Commissioned by the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra
Dedicated to music director
Riccardo Muti
2
At the time, Bates was an English major—he
attended the Columbia–Juilliard joint program
and received degrees in both English literature and
musical composition—he didn’t realize that magical realism or any other form of fiction would have
a direct impact on the music he would write. Now
that he is an established composer with a catalog
of works that get regular performances—a recent
survey claims he is the second most performed
living composer—Bates says that literature is his
primary nonmusical influence. Yet although books
have often served as a reference point—the form
of Alternative Energy, the “energy symphony” he
wrote for the CSO and Muti and introduced here
in February 2012, was indebted to the changing
time frames of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—this
is his first major work that is actually based on a
book. In his preface to the anthology, Borges says
that it was never intended for consecutive reading,
and he recommends that the reader dip into the
pages at random, “just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope,” giving Bates free
reign to pick and choose from among Borges’s 120
creatures in compiling his own musical anthology.
Bates selected creatures based on the musical
possibilities they offered. The Sprite, for example,
allowed him to toss material from one violin
stand to another—an effect he had long wanted
to try—and then finally offstage. It is “something
like a miniature relay race at high speeds,” he
says. The A Bao A Qu, a serpent that slithers up
a tower and then slides back down, suggested the
form of a palindrome—music that is the same
backwards and forwards. Bates had never heard
a musical palindrome that actually sounds like
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, three oboes
and english horn, three clarinets, E-flat
clarinet and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns,
three trumpets and piccolo trumpet,
three trombones, tuba, xylophone,
glockenspiel, large Chinese drum,
woodblocks, crash cymbals, crotales,
triangle, bass drum, snare drum,
castanets, tam-tam, ratchet, Asian
woodblock, suspended cymbals,
wind machine, conga, tambourine,
almglocken, hi-hat, whip, vibraphone,
wood switches, Asian drum, timpani,
harp, piano, celesta, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
30 minutes
one—“as if the record suddenly spins backwards,”
he says—and he spent a lot of time finding
material that could be “perceptively reversible.”
(The midpoint, when the music turns back on
itself, is marked by a pause in the orchestra and
the “ecstasio” outburst of the wind machine.)
Bates wanted to create a series of colorful character movements—similar to a ballet suite—and
then combine them in the finale. But Bates knew
that the success of a work structured like a ballet
depends on the highly individual and colorful
identity of each movement. “Creating distinctive
music that can be remembered has always been a
challenge for contemporary composers,” he says,
“but whole vistas open if you can create memorable music”—something that can last in man’s
memory, as Borges put it.
Linking Bates’s movements are “forest interludes” that work like the promenades in Pictures
from an Exhibition. But while Mussorgsky’s interludes are relatively simple—“like a palate-cleanser
between paintings,” as Bates says—the Anthology
interludes are surreal and increasingly dark, as
the work progresses from twilight to dawn. As a
result, the sequence of bestiary portraits, themselves growing in size as the work progresses,
is overlaid with a sense of time moving forward
through the hours of the night—all leading up
to the witching-hour finale. Bates is a natural
storyteller, and he has written this score with
Riccardo Muti’s “unique abilities as a musical
dramatist” in mind. “Imaginative narratives were
once a powerful force in symphonic music,” Bates
says, “and I have been fascinated with bringing
them back with entirely new sounds.”
T he Anthology of Fantastic Zoology is the
largest work Bates has written—and one
of the few without his signature infusion
of electronica. Chicago audiences first got to
know Bates’s music through works that regularly
featured him onstage at his laptop, overseeing
a great array of sounds—from recordings of the
1965 Gemini IV spacewalk in The B-Sides, which
Riccardo Muti conducted here in 2011, to the
Fermilab particle accelerator in Alternative Energy.
But in the Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, Bates
found that he needed no more than the musicians
of this orchestra to create even the wildest and
most fantastical music he was after—the score is
so full of unconventional sonic effects, he says,
that you may imagine you are hearing electronic
sounds. For what he calls his “swan song” to the
Chicago Symphony, Bates has paid it the greatest
tribute by writing a concerto for orchestra.
Mason Bates on Anthology of
Fantastic Zoology
T he slim size of Jorge Luis Borges’s
Anthology of Fantastic Zoology belies
the teeming bestiary contained within
its pages. A master of magical realism and
narrative puzzles, Borges was the perfect
writer to create a compendium of mythological
creatures. Several are of his own invention.
The musical realization of this, a kind of psychedelic Carnival of the Animals, is presented in
eleven interlocking movements (a sprawling form
inspired by French and Russian ballet scores). In
between evocations of creatures familiar (sprite,
nymph) and unknown (an animal that is an
island), brief “forest interludes” take us deeper
into the night, and deeper into the forest itself.
Imaginative creatures provoke new sounds and
instrumentation, with a special focus on spatial
possibilities using a variety of soloists. For example, the opening Sprite hops from music stand
to music stand, even bouncing offstage. The A
Bao A Qu is a serpentine creature that slithers up
a tower; gloriously molts at the top; then slides
back down, so the entire movement—like the
life-cycle of the animal—is an exact palindrome.
Nymphs features two frolicking clarinets, while
The Gryphon uses timpani and brass to conjure a
flying lion that hunts horses (in this case, the violins). The lyrical core of the piece, Sirens, features
offstage violins that lure the rest of the strings,
one by one, to an epiphany. But it is short-lived, as
the island they near devours them in The Zaratan,
an island-sized animal conjured by tone clusters.
The sprawling finale occurs at the witching-hour
moment between midnight and dawn (madrugada,
from the Spanish). This movement collapses the
entire work upon itself, and all of the animals fuse
together in the darkest, deepest part of the forest.
In the virtuosity the piece requires of soloists
and sections, it resembles a concerto for orchestra, and every note was written with specific
players in mind. Many of the players in the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra have become dear
friends, as has Maestro Riccardo Muti—whose
unique abilities as a musical dramatist inspired
the piece from beginning to end. 3
Piotr Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, Viatka, Russia.
Died November 18, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Ten years passed between
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and
Fifth symphonies—a
decade which saw his
international reputation
grow as he finished
Eugene Onegin and three
other (less successful)
operas, the Violin
Concerto, the 1812
Overture, the Serenade for Strings, a second
piano concerto, the Manfred Symphony, the
A minor piano trio, and the Capriccio italien. As
he began this symphony, Tchaikovsky feared his
muse was exhausted. “I am dreadfully anxious to
prove not only to others, but also to myself, that I
am not yet played out as a composer,” he said at
the time. In the spring of 1888, Tchaikovsky had
recently moved into a new house outside of
Moscow, and as he was beginning this symphony, he found great joy working in his garden;
he wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck,
that when he was “past composing” he might
devote himself to growing flowers. Work on the
new symphony was often rough going. “The
beginning was difficult,” he reported midsummer, “now, however, inspiration seems to have
come.” He later complained, “I have to squeeze it
from my dulled brain.” But by the end of the
summer, when four months of intensive work had
brought him to the last measures of the symphony’s finale, he admitted that “it seems to me that
I have not blundered, that it has turned out well.”
COMPOSED
May–August 26, 1888
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 17, 1888, Saint Petersburg.
The composer conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCE
April 1 & 2, 1892, Auditorium Theatre.
Theodore Thomas conducting
July 26, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Henry
Weber conducting
4
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony had been his
answer to Beethoven’s Fifth: it’s a symphony of
triumph over fate, and he explained its meaning
in detailed correspondence with Mme von Meck.
For his next symphony, Tchaikovsky again
turned to the theme of fate, although this time
he gave away little of the work’s hidden meaning.
As a motto theme, Tchaikovsky picked a phrase
from Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar which accompanies the words “turn not into sorrow.” Before
he began composing, he sketched a program for
the work in his notebook, labeling the theme as
“complete resignation before Fate,” and describing the first movement as “doubts . . . reproaches
against xxx.” That xxx, like the cryptic Z that
appears elsewhere in the same pages, refers,
almost without doubt, to the homosexuality he
dared not admit. (It remained a well-kept secret
during his life. His friends didn’t know what to
make of the disastrous match that publicly passed
for a marriage—lasting only weeks and driving
the composer to attempt suicide—or of his one
satisfying relationship with a woman, Nadezhda
von Meck, whom he never met in fourteen years
and couldn’t bring himself to speak to the one
time they accidentally passed on the street.)
T he symphony opens with an introduction
in which the motto theme is quietly
played by the clarinet (it returns later in
the most dramatic form). The Allegro also begins
with a gently moving theme in the clarinet,
doubled by the bassoon. (Tchaikovsky launches
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
September 23 & 27, 2011, Orchestra
Hall. Riccardo Muti conducting
August 8, 2013, Ravinia Festival. Itzhak
Perlman conducting
CSO RECORDINGS
1928. Frederick Stock conducting.
Victor
1966. Morton Gould conducting. RCA
(Third movement only)
1968. Seiji Ozawa conducting. RCA
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, four
horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, strings
1975. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
49 minutes
1995. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Teldec.
1985. Claudio Abbado conducting. CBS
1987–88. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
this E minor melody from the lower C, rising a
third to E, rather than from the lower fourth,
B—the more predictable start, and the way many
listeners incorrectly remember it.) This ultimately
leads to the remote key of D major, where the
violins introduce a lovely sighing theme, delicately
scored at first, then blossoming to encompass the
full orchestra. The development section travels
through many harmonic regions, but presents very
little actual development, because Tchaikovsky’s
themes are full melodies, not easily dissected.
The Andante presents one of Tchaikovsky’s
most beloved themes, a horn melody so poignant
and seductive that it tempts many listeners to
overlook the eloquent strands the clarinet and
oboe weave around it. The opening bars of quiet
sustained chords begin in B minor and then
swing around to D major—that unexpected
tonal territory from the first movement—before
the hushed entry of the horn. The lyrical flow is
halted by the motto theme, first announced by
the full orchestra over a fierce timpani roll midway through, and once again just before the end.
The third movement is a minor-key waltz; a
livelier trio, with playful runs in the strings, also
sounds uneasy, suggesting something sinister on
the horizon. Perhaps it’s the fateful motto theme,
which sounds quietly in the low winds just
before the dance is over. The finale opens with
the motto, fully harmonized and in the major
mode. This furiously driven movement often
has been derided as overly bombastic, formulaic,
and repetitive, although it has many delicate
touches, including a high, singing theme in the
winds. The tempo never eases, not even in the
one moment of repose that is marked pianissimo
and lightly scored. The motto theme sweeps
through, once at a brisk speed, and then, near the
end, leading a magnificent march. It’s the main
melody of the first movement, however, that
comes rushing in to close the symphony.
T chaikovsky conducted the first performance of the symphony in Saint
Petersburg in November 1888 and
introduced the work in Europe on a concert tour
in early 1889. In Hamburg he met Brahms, who
postponed his departure in order to hear his
Russian colleague’s latest symphony; Brahms
liked what he heard, except for the finale.
Tchaikovsky was far from written out. Before
he even finished this symphony, he began the
fantasy overture Hamlet, and, a few weeks later,
he started work on a new ballet about a sleeping
beauty who is awakened with a prince’s kiss. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
In Memoriam
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra recalls with sorrow those musicians who have
recently died.
ADRIAN DA PRATO (1920–2015)
Violin, 1946–1996
RICHARD KANTER (1935–2014)
Oboe, 1961–2002
SAM DENOV (1923–2015)
Percussion, 1954–1985
WILLIAM SCHOEN (1919–2014)
Viola, 1964–1996
JOHN HENIGBAUM (1922–2015)
Horn, 1949–1951
We also note the passing of His Eminence, Francis Cardinal George, the eighth
archbishop of Chicago and archbishop emeritus since September 2014, who died on
April 17, 2015. Cardinal George was a friend of the Orchestra and regularly attended
CSO concerts, most recently a performance of Mozart’s Requiem this past February.
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
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