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PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Sunday, May 21, 2017, at 3:00 Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago All-Access Chamber Music Series MALLARMÉ QUARTET AND FRIENDS Rong-Yan Tang Violin Melanie Kupchynsky Violin Max Raimi Viola Loren Brown Cello Patrice Michaels Soprano Stephen Williamson Clarinet Dvořák String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major, Op. 51 Allegro ma non troppo Dumka (Elegia) Romanza Finale: Allegro assai RONG-YAN TANG MELANIE KUPCHYNSKY MAX RAIMI LOREN BROWN Raimi Two Songs for Soprano Story of the Pennies At My Wedding PATRICE MICHAELS STEPHEN WILLIAMSON MAX RAIMI LOREN BROWN INTERMISSION Beethoven String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2 (Razumovsky) Allegro Molto adagio Allegretto Finale: Presto RONG-YAN TANG MELANIE KUPCHYNSKY MAX RAIMI LOREN BROWN The All-Access Chamber Music series is generously underwritten by an anonymous donor. COMMENTS by Laura Sauer Louis Armstrong famously affirmed, “All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.” In addition to popular song, the distinct character of folk music appealed broadly to Western classical composers, who utilized it in their own music to express nationalistic fervor, reference heritage, and to signify a culture or region. Each composer on this program includes elements of folk music that derived from a specific relationship with it: Dvořák grew up playing viola in his village band from a young age; Max Raimi, composer and violist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, chose Yiddish texts for his two songs for soprano, inspired by singing with his grandparents on the Jewish sabbath as a child; Beethoven used Russian folk melodies from a book of songs published in Saint Petersburg in 1790 in two of the opus 59 string quartets written for his patron, the Russian ambassador to Vienna. D vořák’s reputation is synonymous with Czech nationalism. While living in America, he often wrote about his intense homesickness and desire to see his beloved Bohemia again. His affinity for folk music is likely not entirely due to patriotism, however. The energy of the exuberant dances and rustic melodies of his homeland were infectious, and he worked elements of his musical past into his new compositions. Having recently completed his famous Slavonic Dances in 1878, Dvořák was commissioned by violinist Jean Becker of the Florentine Quartet to write a new quartet “in the Slav spirit.” His tenth string quartet carries the Slavonic, which hardly distinguishes it among the Czech composer’s repertoire typified by this influence. The quartet’s opening movement cleverly oscillates between major and minor, its frolicking beat and stepwise motion strongly characteristic of Czech folk dances. If excerpted, the first violin part could easily have been fiddled by Dvořák back in his native village Antonín Dvořák of Nelahozeves, where he 2 lived until the age of seventeen. The movement includes a tranquil theme for the second violin and viola—charming in its simplicity—along with a lively violin melody. The second movement is a dumka, a piece of Slavic music that originated as a folk ballad, usually a melancholy main theme with contrasting more animated sections. The lament receives a folksy tinge from half-step movements that change unpredictably to whole steps, supported by plucked chords reminiscent of guitar accompaniment. Dvořák encourages the music’s flow to remain organic and flexible. Another Czech dance, a furiant— quick, cheerful, and alternating between duple and triple time—follows. The third movement (Romanze) is typified by its lush and beautiful texture. More than in the other movements, its music unifies the quartet members as they play a lilting rhythm together, sometimes breaking off into violin and viola or viola and cello duets. One more Bohemian influence shows itself in the final movement: the skačna, a jolly Bohemian fiddle tune. This definition couldn’t better describe its opening, which playfully diverts into a delightful dance punctuated with pizzicatos and looping roulades. At its pinnacle, the finale’s instrumentation sounds as huge as to also deserve the name of “symphonic quartet” (a nickname commonly given to Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets), but this only lasts for a few moments. Dvořák once declared, “My publishers know by now that I shall no longer write anything just for them.” This quartet is music to be enjoyed by all. M ax Raimi utilized folk texts that honor his own heritage for his “Story of the Pennies” and “At My Wedding.” While searching for Jewish texts that focused on music, he pored over hundreds of translated Yiddish poems. He writes, One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is spending Friday evenings celebrating the Jewish Sabbath at the home of my paternal grandparents. Our family was not at all religious, but the traditions of the past were meaningful to us. We would . . . sing songs my grandparents had grown up with in a Polish shtetl. I discovMax Raimi ered some recordings by the extraordinary klezmer bands that began emerging in the 1990s. Although the liturgical tradition of Jewish music that I grew up on is of a different strain than klezmer, they are branches of the same tree, and I developed a yearning to write music influenced by this aspect of my own childhood. Raimi felt it would be enjoyable to set his selected texts to music rooted in multiple cultural traditions, including klezmer, gypsy, Slavic, cantorial, and Yiddish music—all of which easily meld with Western musical styles and practices. Raimi’s “Story of the Pennies” comments frankly on fear as a universal emotion. Two musical motives bring the pennies’ stories to life: pizzicatos symbolize the pennies themselves and a tremolo “fear motif ” signifies the poor coins’ distress. The soprano sings about the journey of each penny; suddenly, time stands still and there is a long descending scale (perhaps a nod to Jewish cantorial singing) followed by an unresolved tritone and long pause (“sometimes a penny returned from the other world”). When night falls and the pennies begin trading stories of their adventures, tremolos waver, leading to a final declaration sung softly: “We are all afraid.” The text of “At My Wedding” suggests that sometimes music can be so incredibly beautiful, it is almost painful and that music transcends religion and culture. The song, peppered with tritones and meandering wails from the clarinet and soprano, creates a sort of unease, mirroring the text’s conflict between the narrator, a Jewish person who tells the story of his or her wedding, and a non-devout Jewish fiddler performing at the wedding, who “can barely manage a prayer in Hebrew,” sleeps on benches, and accompanies “the goyim’s brawls.” There are moments in which the music is almost ugly, a deliberate choice made by Raimi. And yet, though the fiddler, bride, and groom practice Judaism in very different ways, the wedding guests are brought to a sort of agonizing bliss, crying “Rachmonas!,” which translates as, “. . . an ability to truly feel the suffering of a fellow human being. I see this as a theme that unifies the two poems I set to music here, and indeed a cornerstone of Jewish ethics as I imperfectly understand it,” according to Raimi. T he Razumovsky Quartets get their nickname from their sponsor: Count Andreas Razumovsky, a Russian ambassador to Vienna and music lover. Their premiere was rocky; even the musicians who first performed them complained that they were difficult to play and not tuneful enough. Supposedly, when the violinist who wrote the fingerings for each quartet commented on their lack of musicality, Beethoven retorted, “They are not for you. They are for a later time.” The composer’s response proved correct: these quartets show a side of Beethoven more dissonant, introspective, and exploratory, veering away from his “heroic” compositional style. At the time of their Ludwig van premiere, chamber music Beethoven was still very much parlor music played mostly by amateurs. Almost twenty years after it was premiered, the prominent music journal Allgemeine 3 musikalische Zeitung, still called the Second Quartet “important, but . . . unpopular” and “bizarre.” Despite their initial poor reception, Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets expanded the chamber music form in the same way his symphonies changed orchestral music forever. The second op. 59 quartet is daring, filled with stark rhythms, chromaticism, and dissonance. Its beginning is turbulent and unsettling, featuring dramatic use of silence. The two principal themes are not tuneful melodies but two blunt chords and a sweet two-measure winding utterance that reappear throughout the movement; otherwise, the movement’s character is enigmatic. Near the end, the two-chord theme takes on a completely different feel as Beethoven marks them piano for the first time in the movement, transitioning into an almost crude passage of grunting dissonant chords. This is certainly not parlor music. In contrast, musicologist Nicholas Mathew describes the second movement as “chamber sublime.” Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny claimed that Beethoven wrote it “while contemplating the starry sky and thinking of the music of the spheres.” This E major lullaby uses the first violin as accompaniment at first, while the second violin, viola, and cello enter one by one. Here, dotted rhythms and scale passages that were so fiery and furious in the opening movement are filled with spacious wonder—whole steps part the clouds instead of dissonance, and trills are 4 given their time. An unexpected move to minor hearkens back to the opening movement’s darkness. If this is a nocturne, it’s one layered with restless thoughts. Finally, the cello falls quietly back to E major. The third movement features two compact contrapuntal sections with an opening scherzo and a trio on the Russian folk song “Glory be to God in Heaven.” Beethoven saves the most virtuosic playing for the final Presto; it’s music that requires the utmost rhythmic clarity coupled with a bit of abandon in execution to keep the energy high. The first violin skips across its strings, accompanied by a gallop from the second violin, viola, and cello. A flurried descent that brings Bach’s fugues to mind move into an excited conversation. There are no long, drawn-out notes in this finale—it ends with six quick chords. Hearing this quartet, one can almost envision Beethoven, so frustrated with his deafness that he laid his keyboard on the ground and pounded on the keys, desperate to hear their vibrations through the floorboards. On the sketches for the Razumovsky Quartets, Beethoven penned a new self-manifesto: “Let your deafness no longer be a secret— even in art.” Laura Sauer is a regular preconcert lecturer and marketing associate for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Max Raimi Two Songs for Soprano STORY OF THE PENNIES AT MY WEDDING Pennies feel at home mostly with poor people, with beggars. They gather in their pockets; this is their saloon. At my wedding a fair-haired madman fiddled on the smallest, gentlest little fiddle. He played a lament, an old-fashioned song. Silent, amazed, the old musicians wondered— Where did he learn it? That fair-haired fool! He spends his days and nights with the goyim, fiddling at their brawls! He can barely manage a prayer in Hebrew. He sleeps on a bench and eats wherever he happens to be, As when a peasant gives him radishes from her garden. He played at my wedding. Lifting us to our feet, we wanted to fly but stay in place. Our ears were pointed in the air like spears as his little fiddle kissed and lacerated the people; Tore them apart until strung as taut as the fiddler’s strings. The doddering old folks cried out, “Have rachmonas!” Now and then they meet an old friend, Rub up against acquaintances, maybe a relative. Sometimes a penny scorched in a fire, Sometimes a rusty one, dug up from a well, Sometimes an old-fashioned penny the size of a dollar, Sometimes a penny returned from the other world. At night, when the beggar goes home, the pennies trade stories. One penny said, “A child warmed me in his mouth, what a pleasure!” A second penny said, “Once I was rolling on the floor. A cat chased me. So I lay down and let myself be sniffed. She snarled at me! She sprang up, stared at me from across the room. I lay still. She ran over, hissed at me, tried to scare me. I lay still. She began to tickle me with her paw. I trembled in my fear. It made her tail stand up. She thought I was crying. In fact, I was laughing for attention. A stranger heard and picked me up.” Yankev-Yitskhok Segal (1896–1954) A third penny said, “Once in someone’s pocket I was frightened by a key. Thought it was a saw that would cut me in two! The key started a conversation; he himself is afraid of a hatchet!” We are all afraid. Aaron Lutzky (1894–1957) © 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra 5