Program

Thursday, May 24, 2012, at 8:00Friday, May 25, 2012, at 1:30Saturday, May 26, 2012, at 8:00

David robertson ConductorEmanuel ax Piano

HindemithSymphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von WeberAllegroTurandot: ScherzoAndantinoMarch

BeethovenPiano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor)AllegroAdagio un poco mosso—Rondo: Allegro

EMANuEl Ax

IntErmIssIon

rachmaninovSymphonic Dances, Op. 45Non allegroAndante con moto (Tempo di valse)lento assai—Allegro vivace

ONE HuNDRED TWENTy-FiRST SEASON

Chicago symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music DirectorPierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is most grateful to Judy Istock, CSO Life Trustee, for her generous support as lead sponsor of the Keys to the City Piano Festival. The festival receives additional generous support from The Chicago Community Trust, Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation, Mr. & Mrs. Paul G. Gignilliat, Joe and Madeleine Glossberg, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Media support for the Keys to the City Piano Festival is provided by Chicago Tribune and WFMT.

The CSO gratefully acknowledges Mrs. Arthur Edelstein for her generous support of the May 25 concert.This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

KeysCityto the

CommEnts by PHilliP HuSCHER

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symphonic metamorphosis on themes by Carl maria von Weber

Paul HindemithBorn November 16, 1895, Hanau, Germany.Died December 28, 1963, Frankfurt, Germany.

In March 1940, choreographer and dancer Léonid Massine wrote to

Paul Hindemith asking if he would be interested in composing a ballet based on music by Carl Maria von Weber. Hindemith had always taken an unusually serious interest both in the music of the past and in the musical heritage of his native Germany, so paying homage to Weber naturally appealed to him. And, perhaps because Hindemith was in the process of building a new life for himself in a strange country, he was particularly taken with the idea of maintaining his German musical roots.

A political refugee, Hindemith had left Germany in 1937, liv-ing in Switzerland before moving to the United States in February

1940, the month before he received Massine’s request. While he was in Switzerland, Hindemith had worked with Massine on Nobilissima visione, a ballet on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi based on the famous frescoes by Giotto in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy. For that score, Hindemith had at first considered borrowing music from medieval composers, and, although he gave up on that idea, the prospect of writing a new ballet indebted to Weber, to whom he felt consider-ably closer, not just in time but in sensibility as well, was irresistible.

In the spring of 1940, when Hindemith had a temporary teaching position at the University of Buffalo and the dancer was

ComPosED1940–1943

FIrst PErFormanCEJanuary 20, 1944, New york. Artur Rodzinski conducting

FIrst Cso PErFormanCEJuly 27, 1944 (Andantino and March only), Ravinia Festival. Efrem Kurtz conducting

February 1, 1945, Orchestra Hall. Hans lange conducting

most rECEnt Cso PErFormanCEMarch 4, 2006, Orchestra Hall. bernard Haitink conducting

InstrumEntatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and

tuba, timpani, tambourine, snare drum, tenor drum, tom-toms, bass drum, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, tubular bells, woodblock, glockenspiel, strings

aPProxImatE PErFormanCE tImE21 minutes

Cso rECorDIng1953. Rafael Kubelík conducting. Mercury

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on tour in the United States, the two sat down together to discuss the Weber project. But between Massine’s invitation and their meeting, Hindemith went to see a performance of Massine’s pro-duction of the Bacchanale from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which he dismissed as “simply stupid.” When he learned that Massine wanted to commission sets and costumes for the new Weber ballet from Salvador Dali, whose contribution to the Bacchanale Hindemith had particularly hated, the composer quickly withdrew from the proj-ect. In the meantime, however, Hindemith had already begun studying Weber’s music and sketch-ing ways to treat his predecessor’s themes. Three years later, he real-ized that although he had shelved the Weber project, he hadn’t dismissed the composer’s music from his thoughts, and so he wrote this Symphonic Metamorphosis on themes by Weber to fulfill one of his first American commissions, from the New York Philharmonic.

Hindemith settled on the idea of a four-movement symphonic work, although it is clearly not a symphony in the classical sense, but a symphony of variations—a set of transformations of four Weber themes. Hindemith didn’t choose familiar Weber material, but instead picked lesser—or at least slighter—pieces that would most

benefit from the kind of “metamor-phosis” that he had in mind.

Hindemith begins with an exotic and noisy Allegro, originally a piano duet, which gains immeasur-ably in both color and atmosphere from the translation for full orches-tra. The second-movement scherzo is drawn from incidental music that Weber wrote in 1809 for Schiller’s translation of Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandot—the same play that, in the years between Weber’s and Hindemith’s treatments, served as the source for Puccini’s last opera. The vaguely oriental principal melody itself is one that Weber had lifted from a collection of “genuine” Chinese tunes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionaire de musique. Like many oriental fantasies by Western European composers through the ages, it is colored by bright and busy percussion.

The third-movement Andantino is drawn from a set of piano duets that Weber composed for his employer’s daughters, the princesses Maria and Amalia of Württenberg. A florid flute obbligato is an espe-cially felicitous addition to Weber’s unassuming theme. Hindemith closes with a march, also originally composed for piano duet, which is a genuine transformation, not just in sonority and color, but in char-acter as well, that makes Weber’s solemn Maestoso into a rousing and exuberant finale.

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Piano Concerto no. 5 in E-flat major, op. 73 (Emperor)

It’s hard for today’s audiences to appreciate the audacities of

Beethoven’s final piano concerto, the one we call the Emperor. For those who are familiar not only with this great work, but with any of the later concertos that took their cues from Beethoven’s example, the grand piano flourishes with which the score begins have little shock value. Nor does the size and complexity of the first movement trouble those who not only have traveled its many paths before, but also have come to accept the vast landscapes of Mahler.

But to those who packed the Leipzig Gewandhaus in November 1811, this was new music, full of revelations and surprises. To begin

with, Beethoven wasn’t at the keyboard—this was the only one of his five piano concertos that he didn’t personally introduce to the public. Although it wasn’t com- mon knowledge at the time, by 1811 his deafness was so advanced (he began to notice symptoms as early as 1796) that he may have turned this work over to other hands rather than admit the dif-ficulties of playing for an audience. (In 1815, he abandoned work on sketches for a sixth concerto, in D, certain that his performing days were over.)

Beethoven begins with a single majestic E-flat major chord from the full orchestra—one of those sounds so commanding and

Ludwig van BeethovenBorn December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany.Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria.

ComPosED1809

FIrst PErFormanCENovember 28, 1811, leipzig, Germany

FIrst Cso PErFormanCEFebruary 10, 1900, Auditorium Theatre. ignace Paderewski, piano; Theodore Thomas conducting

most rECEnt Cso PErFormanCEsMarch 14, 2009, Orchestra Hall. Valentina lisitsa, piano; James Gaffigan conducting

July 16, 2010, Ravinia Festival. Jorge Federico Osorio, piano; James Conlon conducting

InstrumEntatIontwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

aPProxImatE PErFormanCE tImE38 minutes

Cso rECorDIngs1942. Artur Schnabel, piano; Frederick Stock conducting. RCA

1961. Van Cliburn, piano; Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1971. Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Georg Solti conduct-ing. london

1983. Alfred brendel, piano; James levine conducting. Philips

A 1940 performance with Joseph Hofmann, piano, and Hans lange conducting is included on Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years; and a 1966 performance with Emil Gilels, piano, and Jean Martinon conducting is included on From the Archives, vol. 17.

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individual that today, without hearing another note, we know what is sure to follow. The 1811 audience, of course, didn’t know what to expect, and they surely wouldn’t have predicted the sudden, cadenza-like eruption from the soloist that Beethoven gives them. Hearing from the soloist so early in a concerto is bold and unconven-tional, but it’s not without prec-edent. Mozart tried it once, early in his career, and Beethoven himself had begun his previous concerto—the fourth, in G major—with the piano alone. But here Beethoven isn’t striving for novelty; he’s preparing us for what lies ahead—a musical argument of unprecedented breadth and scale between two protagonists of equal stature.

Only after Beethoven com-mands our attention with three emphatic chords, each followed by long-winded outbursts from the piano, does he settle down to his first theme, a heroic tune in E-flat major. The piano falls silent and the orchestral exposition sweeps forward with great energy. This is an enormous movement, last-ing some twenty minutes, and it’s longer than the following two movements combined. But for all the time and space it occupies, it’s not hard to follow. Beethoven alone among composers of his generation knew how to expand the classical structures he inherited without upsetting their delicate proportions or abandoning their inner logic.

The slow movement is in B major—a remote key, but one which is familiar from the earliest

digressions of the opening Allegro. The strings begin with a noble theme, to which the piano responds with an eloquent cantilena. Midway through, the piano has a chain of trills that rises more than an octave by half steps, while the orchestra plays broken chords, as if stunned by this daring high-wire act. Finally, there is the celebrated moment when the strings drop from B to B-flat, and the piano begins to putter with the makings of a daz-zling new theme, which it suddenly unleashes without pause to open the rondo finale. This robust and seem-ingly tireless music dashes headlong through a generous sampling of keys until it collapses just before the end, leaving only the piano and the timpani to reach the final bars.

Beethoven’s brilliance wasn’t lost on the Leipzig audience, who took it all in and applauded enthusiasti-cally. The critic for the prestigious Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported that this was “undoubt-edly one of the most original, imaginative, effective—but also most difficult—of all existing concertos”—words that still hold true today. Beethoven withheld the important Vienna premiere until February 1812, perhaps still vainly hoping that he might be able to take his place at the keyboard. It was his student, however, the young Carl Czerny, who played that night. The response this time was poor, perhaps because this grand and noble work was tacked on to a char-ity event which consisted largely of Viennese society ladies in living tableaux of famous paintings.

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symphonic Dances, op. 45

After finishing his Third Symphony in 1936,

Rachmaninov quit composing, dis-couraged by the lukewarm reception several of his recent scores had met. (Only the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini had been well received; both the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Variations on a Theme by Corelli were public failures, and the Third Symphony was only a modest success). Rachmaninov was tired of trying to juggle his careers as a composer, conductor, and pianist—and in recent years it seemed that he was only guaranteed success in his role as pianist (he was, after all, one of the greatest of all time). Perhaps he also had grown weary of having his music dismissed as old-fashioned and irrelevant—invariably pitted against the radical work of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, the two giants of the day.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Rachmaninov and his wife Natalya left Europe for the last time and settled in Orchard Point, an estate he had rented on Long Island, near his friends Vladimir and Wanda Horowitz; his former secretary, Evgeny Somov; and choreographer Michel Fokine, who recently had made a popular ballet of the Paganini Variations. Throughout the summer of 1940, Rachmaninov was busy preparing for his upcoming concert tour—he regularly practiced every day from early morning until eleven at night—and, for the first time in years, he found that he couldn’t resist the urge to compose. On August 21 he wrote to Eugene Ormandy, who had conducted some of Rachmaninov’s greatest successes with the Philadelphia Orchestra, “Last week I finished

sergei rachmaninovBorn April 1, 1873, Semyonovo, Russia.Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, California.

ComPosED1940

FIrst PErFormanCEJanuary 3, 1941, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

FIrst Cso PErFormanCEDecember 11, 1941, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

most rECEnt Cso PErFormanCEsOctober 5, 2004, Orchestra Hall. Charles Dutoit conducting

July 10, 2008, Ravinia Festival. leonard Slatkin conducting

InstrumEntatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet,

alto saxophone, two bas-soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, tambou-rine, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, xylophone, snare drum, chimes, harp, piano, strings

aPProxImatE PErFormanCE tImE35 minutes

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a new symphonic piece, which I naturally want to give first to you and your orchestra. It is called Fantastic Dances. I shall now begin the orchestration.” Even with his impending tour, Rachmaninov managed to complete the scoring that October. By then the dances had become symphonic rather than fantastic, and he also had given up his original idea to identify the three movements as midday, twilight, and midnight. (“It should have been called just Dances,” he told a newspaper reporter, “but I was afraid people would think I had written dance music for jazz orchestra.”)

Before Ormandy even had a chance to see the score, Rachmaninov played through parts of it at the piano for Fokine, hoping that he would want to collaborate on another ballet—this was a set of dances, after all—and repeat the international success of their Paganini project. Fokine was enthusiastic—“it seemed to me appropriate and beautiful,” he wrote to Rachmaninov, after hearing the music—but his death, in August 1942, robbed the composer of both a friend and another hit ballet.

The Philadelphia premiere was well received, but a subsequent performance in New York was panned. Rachmaninov was hurt that Ormandy didn’t appear interested in recording the new work, even though he had made best-selling records of practically all his previous orchestral pieces. The Symphonic Dances turned out to be his last score, and Rachmaninov died believing that it would never

find the kind of popularity his earlier music had so easily won. (Although Rachmaninov had spent long periods of time in the United States since 1918, the Symphonic Dances is the only score he com-posed in this country—earlier, he regularly wrote, on breaks from concert tours, in his villa near Lucerne.) But in recent years, the

score has become a favorite of orchestras and audiences alike—Rachmaninov’s star is once again on the rise.

The first dance has an extended solo for saxophone, an instru-ment for which Rachmaninov had never written before. (He consulted with his friend, the Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett, who was amazed that, when the composer played the score for him, “he sang, whistled, stamped, rolled his chords, and otherwise conducted himself not as one would expect of so great and impeccable a piano virtuoso.”) He also got advice on string bowings

Conductor Eugene Ormandy

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Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

from no less an artist than Fritz Kreisler. (At the first rehearsal, when Ormandy remarked on their difficulty, Rachmaninov said, “Fritz did those for me,” knowing he need say no more.) In the coda of the first dance, Rachmaninov privately quotes the opening theme of his First Symphony, which was the greatest failure of his career (after its disastrous premiere in 1897, Rachmaninov wrote noth-ing for three years). Rachmaninov knew that only he would catch the reference, because he had long since destroyed the score, hop-ing to erase painful memories along with the music itself. But shortly after his death, a copy of a two-piano arrangement, and then a set of orchestra parts, turned up in Leningrad, bringing Rachmaninov’s secret quotation to light.

The second movement is a melan-choly waltz (in 6/8 time) that only turns more anxious and wistful as it progresses. The finale quotes the chant of the Russian Orthodox liturgy as well as the Gregorian melody of the Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead. It also recycles part of his All-Night Vigil, an a cap-pella choral work dating from 1915, but this is no secret quotation, for Rachmaninov writes the original text, “Alliluya,” in the score at that point. Perhaps guessing that this would be his final work—“It must have been my last spark,” he said at the time—Rachmaninov wrote at the end of his manuscript, “I thank thee, Lord.”

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