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Program
One Hundred Twenty-Third Season
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, April 3, 2014, at 8:00
Saturday, April 5, 2014, at 8:00
Tuesday, April 8, 2014, at 7:30
Esa-Pekka Salonen Conductor
Clyne
<<rewind<<
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
Bartók
Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19
Intermission
Sibelius
Four Legends from the Kalevala, Op. 22
Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari
Lemminkäinen in Tuonela
The Swan of Tuonela
Scott Hostetler, english horn
Lemminkäinen’s Return
CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.
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
anna Clyne
Born March 9, 1980, London, England.
<<rewind<<
The work by Anna Clyne
that our orchestra is
playing this week,
<<rewind<<, comes from
early in her still-young
career, before she had
moved to Chicago as one
of our Mead
Composers-in-Residence.
At the time, she was
living in Brooklyn and composing in a gloomy,
windowless room in a warehouse because she
couldn’t fit a piano in her apartment. “I could
probably compose anywhere,” Clyne once said,
reflecting on a process that is so consuming that
the outside world often disappears. When she’s
deep into a piece, she sometimes works through
the night, which is what happened when she was
composing <<rewind<<.
Like many of Clyne’s compositions, it was
originally a collaborative project—in this case,
a piece to be danced. Clyne gravitates to collaboration because, as she puts it, it forces you
to break out of your shell—and she thrives on
the kind of creative dialogue it opens. Although
she is known for working with artists in other
disciplines—choreographers, fi lmmakers,
writers, painters—she also loves to collaborate
with musicians in the process of working out
the details of a new composition—something
that will undoubtedly shape the violin concerto
she is writing for Jennifer Koh and the CSO to
premiere next season.
ComPoSEd
2005; revised 2006, 2010
FIrSt PErFormanCE
February 17, 2005; Manhattan School
of Music, new york City
FIrSt CSo PErFormanCES
These are the first Chicago Symphony
Orchestra performances.
2
With most of her compositions, including
<<rewind<<, Clyne begins by working at a piano,
because she likes the tactile sensation of trying
things out on the instrument. Clyne’s music
itself is very physical—when she was writing
<<rewind<<, music that was designed to be
danced, she would jump around the room to test
how physical gestures matched the sounds and
rhythmic patterns in her score. Clyne’s music
is also deeply personal—never more so than in
Within Her Arms, the piece she wrote in memory
of her mother who died suddenly in 2009. (It
was performed here on a MusicNOW concert
in December 2011.) Clyne learned that writing
music made the grieving process easier—it was
the best way for her to express herself. When
Within Her Arms was premiered in Disney
Concert Hall, on the LA Philharmonic’s Green
Umbrella series, people came up to her to tell her
how moved they were by the piece, even though
they had no idea of the circumstances surrounding its composition. “When you touch people
who don’t know you,” Clyne says, “you sense
there’s something real in the music.”
Clyne initially drew attention for the way
her music combined electronics and acoustic
instruments—that, along with her passion for
collaboration, quickly became her signature. But
in <<rewind<<, composed nearly a decade ago,
she accomplished the same layering of different
sound worlds by writing just for the instruments
of the orchestra, and since then she has often
gravitated away from incorporating electronics.
InStrUmEntatIon
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, four
horns, two trumpets, two trombones,
harp, piano, bass drum, suspended
cymbal, crotales, ratchet, snare drum,
brake drum, xylophone, tam-tam,
vibraphone, sizzle cymbal, low metal
pipe, laptop, timpani, strings
aPProXImatE
PErFormanCE tImE
7 minutes
C lyne has composed two works for the
Chicago Symphony to play during
her residency. Night Ferry, premiered
under Riccardo Muti’s baton in February 2012,
was designed to complement the music of
Franz Schubert and found its dark, flickering
colors and volatile shape after Clyne read that
Schubert suffered from cyclothymia, a form of
depression. Prince of Clouds, performed here in
December 2012, is a double violin concerto that
pays homage to the teacher-student lineage of
the soloists for whom it was composed (Jaime
Laredo and Jennifer Koh) and at the same time
to Bach’s famous concerto for two violins.
C lyne was born in London. Her earliest
physical contact with music was on a
piano with randomly missing keys that
was given to her family when she was seven
years old. She wrote her first fully notated piece,
for flute and piano, at the age of eleven, but at
the time, she had no thoughts of becoming a
composer. Her parents listened to folk music and
the Beatles—the world of the symphony orchestra, where she is now at home, was remote. Clyne
studied cello at Edinburgh University and then
moved to New York in 2002, with little more
than her suitcase and her cello. There she began
her routine of composing at night, supporting
herself as a freelance cellist and with a series of
day jobs. At twenty-three, she received a scholarship to study composition at the Manhattan
School of Music, and her career as a composer
soon took off. Clyne has since received several
important honors, including eight consecutive ASCAP Plus awards and a Charles Ives
Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters. This past September, the Last Night
at the Proms opened with the world premiere
of Clyne’s Masquerade, which was broadcast
globally by the BBC and viewed by millions.
Anna Clyne comments on <<rewind<<
<<rewind<< is inspired by the image of analog
videotape rapidly scrolling backwards with fleeting moments of skipping, freezing, and warping.
The original version, for orchestra and tape, was
composed in 2005 for choreographer and artistic
director of the Los Angeles–based Hysterica
Dance Company, Kitty McNamee. A distinct
characteristic of McNamee’s work is its striking
and innovative use of physical gestures and
movements that recur throughout the course of
her work to build and bind its narrative structure.
This use of repetitive gestures is utilized in the
musical language and structure of <<rewind<<.
The approach I used to compose <<rewind<< is
very much derivative from my work with electroacoustic music; primarily the layering of multiple
sounds and textures to create one solid unit of
sound. As you will hear, the strings are the driving
force behind this music. I started by composing
the entire framework in the strings. This structure
stems from an alternating two-chord motif, heard
within the opening measures of the work. Once
I had this structure in place, I went back to the
beginning and added layers in the other instrumental families. These range from long, sustained,
and warping tones to punchy articulations.
I wrote <<rewind<< while living in New York
City, a city which is true to its legend as one that
doesn’t sleep. I worked on this piece at night,
when the sounds of the city were very much alive
in force. Something that I like about this piece
is the way that the city crept into the music. I
remember at one point, I was sitting at the piano
playing through one of the faster sections when
a van ripped down the adjacent road, blasting
its siren, fading in pitch as it disappeared into
the night. By coincidence, the pitch matched
perfectly the section I was playing, and I added
this siren into the horns—long notes that fell in
pitch through the phrase. 3
Béla Bartók
Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary.
Died September 26, 1945, New York City.
Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, op. 19
After The Miraculous
Mandarin, Bartók never
again attempted to write
music for the theater. His
first stage works, the
opera Bluebeard’s Castle
and the ballet The Wooden
Prince, fared well enough
(although it took six years
to get the opera produced), but The Miraculous Mandarin gave Bartók
continual difficulty. For the rest of his career, he
wrote only concert works—a decision that
produced a number of masterpieces, but denied
the development of his theatrical talent.
In 1917, while he was putting the finishing
touches on The Wooden Prince, Bartók read
Menyhért Lengyel’s libretto for The Miraculous
Mandarin in a Hungarian literary magazine.
(Lengyel had his sights set on the combination
of Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian troupe and the
composer Ernő Dohnányi to create a ballet based
on his scenario.) Bartók immediately informed
Lengyel of his interest in the story and began
to write music. His first sketches date from
August 1917. He worked on the piano score in
1918 and early 1919, completed the orchestration
in 1923, and made further revisions the following
year. Although a piano reduction was published
in 1925, Bartók wasn’t satisfied with the ending
(he had had similar trouble with the conclusion
of Bluebeard’s Castle) and continued to fuss with
it. He didn’t put his final thoughts on paper
until 1931.
When Bartók discovered that Universal
Editions, his Viennese publisher, was advertising
the Mandarin as a ballet, he protested: “I have
to observe that this work is less a ballet than a
pantomime, since only two dances actually occur
in it. It would therefore be much more practical
to call it a pantomime.”
Even before he finished orchestrating the score,
Bartók began to doubt that he would ever see the
work staged. In fact, the performance history of
The Miraculous Mandarin is marked by such formidable struggles that the score didn’t receive the
acclamation it deserves until after the composer’s
death. Only then did musicians understand that
it was Bartók’s greatest work to date—in 1927, he
himself wrote: “In my view, this is the best work
I have so far written for orchestra”—the strongest
of his three stage works, and his first statement in
his unique mature style.
Had The Miraculous Mandarin been staged
under different circumstances, it might have
earned a page in history books alongside the
ComPoSEd
pantomime: 1917 to 1924
suite: completed February 1927
december 9 & 10, 2006, Carnegie
Hall. Pierre Boulez conducting
(complete pantomime)
FIrSt PErFormanCES
complete pantomime: november 27,
1926; Cologne, Germany
InStrUmEntatIon
three flutes and two piccolos, three
oboes and english horn, three
clarinets, e-flat clarinet and bass
clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, side
drums, bass drum, cymbals, triangle,
tam-tam, xylophone, harp, celesta,
piano, organ, strings
suite: October 15, 1928; Budapest,
Hungary
FIrSt CSo PErFormanCES
december 9 & 10, 1948, Orchestra Hall.
eugene Ormandy conducting (suite)
moSt rECEnt
CSo PErFormanCES
november 30, december 1, 2 & 5,
2006, Orchestra Hall. Pierre Boulez
conducting (complete pantomime)
4
aPProXImatE
PErFormanCE tImE
21 minutes
CSo rECordIngS
1954. Antal doráti conducting.
Mercury (suite)
1967. Jean Martinon conducting. RCA
(suite)
1968. istván Kertész conducting. CSO
(Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First
100 Years) (suite)
1989–90. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London (suite)
1994. Chicago Symphony Chorus;
duain wolfe, director; Pierre Boulez
conducting. deutsche Grammophon
(complete pantomime)
scandalous premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of
Spring, for it is music of equally gripping power
and invention. (In 1913, when Paris was reeling
from the shock of The Rite of Spring, Bartók
was in Algeria collecting folk songs; at the time
he drafted The Miraculous Mandarin, he knew
Stravinsky’s score by reputation and in a piano
reduction.) The premiere of The Miraculous
Mandarin, in the conservative city of Cologne in
November 1926, caused an uproar. The audience
walked out, the conductor was officially reprimanded by the mayor Konrad Adenauer, and
the work was subsequently banned. But Cologne
wasn’t at the heart of the music world, and it
wasn’t the composer’s hometown; the incident
passed without making international headlines.
The Miraculous Mandarin wasn’t staged in
Budapest until 1946, after the composer’s death,
and a quarter of a century after the score was
finished. A production in Budapest had been
announced in 1931, as part of the celebration
honoring Bartók’s fiftieth birthday, but it was
canceled after the dress rehearsal, when officials
got wind of the work’s subject matter. Another
performance scheduled for 1941 was opposed by
the clergy. The problems were both the graphic,
intense music and the story—a violent and
erotic tale with implicit social criticism. In 1927,
sensing that the odds were against ever getting
the work staged, Bartók made the orchestral
suite that’s performed at these concerts from the
full score. It’s in this form—essentially the first
two-thirds of the complete pantomime—that The
Miraculous Mandarin has become known.
B artók was strongly drawn to Lengyel’s
powerful and fantastic tale. As The
Miraculous Mandarin begins, a girl is
forced by three thugs to stand in a window,
luring men inside to be robbed. Her first two
victims, an old rake and a shy young man,
are penniless; the third, the eerie but wealthy
mandarin, presents a horrifying challenge. The
girl finds him repulsive, but she slowly begins
her dance of seduction. The thugs attack and
rob the mandarin; three times they try to kill
him, but the mandarin will not die. His eyes are
fixed with longing on the girl. When she finally
embraces him, he falls lifeless to the ground.
(The suite stops just before the thugs attack the
mandarin.) Bartók carefully underlines the story’s
design. Three times the music begins from a total
standstill and builds to a shattering climax—
each section, or “decoy game,” as Bartók calls
it, represents one of the seductions. Bartók uses
orchestration to articulate form, launching each
seduction with a solo clarinet and marking each
of the murder attempts with cymbal crashes.
Bartók begins with the noise and frenzy of
the urban landscape. (Late in his life, he admitted that New York City traffic frightened him
terribly.) After the clarinet signals the first decoy
game, a lewd old man is depicted by the sound of
raucous trombone slides. The attack of the thugs
brings a furious orchestral outburst. The second
decoy game introduces a shy young man, accompanied by a gentle oboe solo. He dances with
the girl, cautiously at first, then with unexpected
passion. Again the thugs attack.
For the third time, the clarinet announces a
decoy game. At the mandarin’s entrance, the
trombones let out three shattering cries. The
music stops except for two notes in the horns,
sustained forever, it seems, like the mandarin’s
piercing gaze. A slow dance of seduction begins.
A waltz starts, falters, and picks up again; a
frantic chase ensues. The music builds to a fever
pitch, pushed almost beyond the breaking point,
and, although the story itself isn’t over yet, the
suite ends with music of breathtaking finality. 5
Jean Sibelius
Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland.
Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland.
Four legends from the Kalevala, op. 22
When Jean Sibelius first
read the Finnish national
epic poem, the Kalevala,
as a young student, he
found the inspiration for
much of the music that
would one day make him
famous and also label him
somewhat unfairly as a
nationalistic composer. In
fact, Sibelius’s first major composition, the
expansive Kullervo, based on the Kalevala, was
such a success in 1892 that, from that point on,
Finland looked no farther for its greatest composer. (The impact of Sibelius’s exposure to the
Kalevala on the rest of his career is closely
paralleled by Bartók’s famous discovery of
Hungarian folk song a decade later.)
Sibelius’s absorption in the Kalevala was
only possible because his family made the
forward-looking decision to transfer him, at the
age of seven, from a popular Swedish-language
preparatory school to the brand-new, first-ever
Finnish-language grammar school. (Until it was
founded, Swedish and Latin were the standard languages of the Finnish school system.)
Although Sibelius didn’t truly master Finnish
till he was in his twenties, this exposure to the
sounds and rhythms of the language fired his
imagination at an early age, and sparked his
ongoing project of reading and rereading the
Kalevala. By 1891, his interest in the epic was
so consuming that he made a special trip to
ComPoSEd
1893–1896
FIrSt PErFormanCE
April 13, 1896; Helsinki, Finland
hear Larin Paraske, a well-known runic singer,
perform episodes from the Kalevala, carefully
observing the inflections of her singing in ways
that would influence his own musical style.
I
n 1893, Sibelius began his first opera,
The Building of the Boat, inspired by the
Kalevala. The next summer he went to
Bayreuth, where he attended more performances of Wagner’s operas than he would
ever admit, falling entirely under the spell of
the profoundly intoxicating music, but also
realizing the competition he would face if he
pursued an operatic career. He abandoned
The Building of the Boat almost as soon as he
returned home. (This trip to Bayreuth was
also motivated by the chance to see how
another composer had chosen to deal with
a great national epic, the Nibelungenlied.)
The Swan of Tuonela is what Sibelius salvaged
from The Building of the Boat—music so striking that one cannot help but wonder about the
operatic career that Wagner, in effect, cut short.
Sibelius conceived this dark and moody music as
the prelude to his opera, and, although it makes
an unconventional operatic opening, it is close to
perfection as a small tone poem. Sibelius realized that at once. In 1896, only two years after
the Bayreuth experience, Sibelius had come to
terms with the new direction of his career and
introduced The Swan and three other tone poems
as Four Pieces from the Kalevala (sometimes
known as the Lemminkäinen Suite).
InStrUmEntatIon
two flutes and two piccolos, two oboes
and english horn, two clarinets and
bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns,
three trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, triangle, tambourine, bells,
bass drum, cymbals, harp, strings
aPProXImatE
PErFormanCE tImE
46 minutes
6
CSo rECordIngS
(THe Swan OF TUOneLa)
1940. Robert Mayer as soloist,
Frederick Stock conducting. Columbia
1991. Grover Schiltz as soloist, Herbert
Blomstedt conducting. CSO (From
the Archives, vol. 15: Soloists of the
Orchestra II)
a straight narrative arc—in fact, particularly in
their original sequence, the four pieces don’t
attempt to tell the story in “order.” (When
Sibelius conducted the first performance in
1896, the two middle movements were played
in the order in which they appear in this week’s
performances. When the Four Legends were
finally published as a set in 1954, the sequence
of the two middle movements was reversed.)
The first (and the longest) of the pieces,
Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari, is a
brilliant atmosphere piece, from the mysterious
opening measures that offer our initial sighting
Larin Paraske. Painting by Albert Edelfelt, 1893
of an ancient, unknown land slowly coming into
view. Musically, this is prime Sibelius territory,
with its frenetic energy of spinning woodwind
he Four Legends from the Kalevala
melodies and stirring strings, and with its
all revolve around the figure of
long stretches of dancing activity over low,
Lemminkäinen, a young and powerful
long-held pedal notes. There are also passionate
hero—not unlike Wagner’s Siegfried—and
lyrical themes that suggest Lemminkäinen’s
something of a Don Juan as well. Each of the
erotic adventures.
four tone poems captures a decisive moment in
Lemminkäinen in Tuonela begins with the
Lemminkäinen’s adventures—hunting, seducunforgettable sound of the turbulent, dark
ing, fighting, and, through his mother’s magical
waters of the River of Death, which will carry
powers, even surviving his own death. (Her
Lemminkäinen’s body to Tuonela. (The surging
magic powers allow her to stitch together the
strings are especially ominous.) The middle
shreds of his mutilated body and bring him back
to life.) Sibelius wasn’t interested in following
section, primarily scored for strings, is one of the
composer’s finest effects; eventually it is dominated by long,
Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari
sinuous melodies (revolving,
recitation-like, around just a
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
MOST RECENT
April 5, 6 & 7, 1984, Orchestra Hall.
CSO PERFORMANCES
few pitches)—the runic singing
Henry Mazer conducting
November 17, 18, 19 & 22, 2005,
of Larin Paraske brought to
Orchestra Hall. Jukka-Pekka
life. The end is cold and bleak.
Saraste conducting
The Swan of Tuonela, the first
of these four tone poems to
Lemminkäinen in Tuonela
be composed, was originally
performed as the third piece,
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
MOST RECENT
as it is this week (and then later
November 14, 15 & 16, 1996, Orchestra
CSO PERFORMANCES
moved to second place, when
Hall. Robert Spano conducting
November 17, 18, 19 & 22, 2005,
the complete set was pubOrchestra Hall. Jukka-Pekka
Saraste conducting
lished). At the top of the score
Sibelius wrote:
T The Swan of Tuonela and
Lemminkäinen’s Return
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
December 6 & 7, 1901, Auditorium
Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting
(U.S. premiere)
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
November 17, 18, 19 & 22, 2005,
Orchestra Hall. Jukka-Pekka
Saraste conducting
Tuonela, the land of death,
the hell of Finnish mythology, is surrounded by a large
river of black waters and
a rapid current, in which
the swan of Tuonela glides
majestically, singing.
7
The Kalevala, Finland’s national epic
The Kalevala was originally published
in 1835 and then enlarged for a second
edition that came out in 1849, which is
now considered the standard version.
It has 50 runos or cantos, totaling
22,795 lines. This edition was compiled
by Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), whose
structural ideal was the Iliad by Homer.
In the beginning, the poetry was sung
(the word runo originally meant sung).
The meter of the Kalevala, like
that of most ancient Finnish poetry,
is trochaic tetrameter, which is best
known to the English-speaking
public from Longfellow’s The Song
of Hiawatha:
The music vividly paints the scene: a plaintive
english horn melody rides serenely over deep
string sonorities. (The strings—con sordino, or
muted, throughout—are divided into thirteen
separate lines; these, in turn, are often further
subdivided.) There is a glimpse of sunlight, signaled by the harp, as the music reaches C major.
But the swan sails off again into the darkness.
Sibelius’s sense of mood and color is keen. His
understanding of sonority, even at this early stage
in his career, is singular: listen, for example, to
how the swan’s song fades over a quietly beating
drum as an icy chill sweeps through the strings
(playing tremolos col legno, or with the wood of
the bow).
The finale of the set, Lemminkäinen’s Return,
is triumphant music of homecoming. Sibelius
quotes from the poem:
Then the lively Lemminkäinen
started on his homeward journey,
saw the lands and saw the beaches.
© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
8
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water
In fact, Longfellow wanted to
convey the impression of an oral
poetry, and he settled on a meter
for Hiawatha after reading a German
translation of the Kalevala.
Here the islands, there the channels,
saw the ancient landing-stages,
saw the former dwelling places.
Sibelius writes music of extraordinary thrust,
generated by the galloping rhythm suggested
by the bassoon at the outset. Through the use
of ostinato patterns and the continual ripple of
sixteenth notes, he never lets the momentum
flag. Neither of Sibelius’s first two symphonies
has a finale to match the excitement and suspense
of this Kalevala music. Within a matter of years,
he would leave the world of the symphonic poem
behind and find ways to achieve comparable
effects within the traditional form of the symphony, but he never surpassed the brilliant drama
and color of the music he composed under the
spell of the Kalevala. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.