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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 CSO_Jun15_in_memoriam_half-page_salute.indd 1 5 6/3/15 3:20 PM