Download Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director

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
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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
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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
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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
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