Please note that Jaap van Zweden has withdrawn from these concerts
on the advice of his doctor. The CSO welcomes Donald Runnicles, who has
graciously agreed to conduct. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto replaces
Bartók’s two Rhapsodies for violin.
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, October 9, 2014, at 8:00
Friday, October 10, 2014, at 1:30
Sunday, October 12, 2014, at 3:00
Donald Runnicles Conductor
Robert Chen Violin
Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Allegro molto appassionato—
Andante—
Allegretto non troppo—Allegro molto vivace
ROBERT CHEN
INTERMISSION
Mahler
Symphony No. 5
Part 1
Funeral March: With measured step. Strict. Like a cortege
Stormily. With greatest vehemence
Part 2
Scherzo: Vigorously, not too fast
Part 3
Adagietto: Very slow
Rondo-Finale: Allegro giocoso. Lively
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
Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany.
Died November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany.
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
On July 30,
1838, Felix
Mendelssohn
wrote to his
friend, the
distinguished
German violinist
Ferdinand
David, “I’d like
to write a violin
concerto for you next winter; one in
E minor sticks in my head, the beginning of which will not leave me in
peace.” With those lines, Mendelssohn
began his last great work—a masterpiece to refute claims of a career in
decline and a concerto that would prove
as popular as any ever written. Sketches
confirm that Mendelssohn knew very
early on how this music would go, and
an extensive correspondence with
David, spanning six years, shows how
much care went into the details.
Mendelssohn was the architect, David
his technical advisor.
David and Mendelssohn were kindred
spirits; both were celebrated prodigies,
COMPOSED
1844
FIRST PERFORMANCE
March 13, 1845; Leipzig,
Germany
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
August 4, 1893, Music Hall
at the World’s Columbian
Exposition. Maud Powell
as soloist, Theodore
Thomas conducting
February 7 & 8, 1896,
Auditorium Theatre. Emile
Sauret as soloist, Theodore
Thomas conducting
July 26, 1941, Ravinia Festival.
Yehudi Menuhin as soloist,
Carlos Chávez conducting
born only a year apart. They became
friends in 1825, the year Ferdinand
David, fifteen, gave his first concerts in
Berlin, and Felix Mendelssohn, sixteen,
composed the magnificent Octet for
strings. That summer, after Abraham
Mendelssohn moved his family to
3 Leipziger Strasse in Berlin, the two
young men became regular chamber
music partners as well.
Ten years later, when Mendelssohn
was named conductor of the Leipzig
Gewandhaus Orchestra, he asked
Ferdinand David to be his concertmaster. In 1843, Mendelssohn founded the
Leipzig Conservatory; he appointed
David to head his violin staff.
Although Mendelssohn had written
to David some five years earlier of his
intention to compose a concerto for him,
it wasn’t until 1844 that he found time to
work on it in earnest. The concerto was
completed on September 16, but as late as
December 17 he wrote to David one last
time, asking him to look at some changes
he had penciled in, even though he had
already sent the score off to his publisher,
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
September 29, 2012,
Orchestra Hall. Anne-Sophie
Mutter as soloist, Riccardo
Muti conducting
January 25, 2013, Chiang
Kai-Shek National Concert
Hall, Taipei, Taiwan. Robert
Chen as soloist, Osmo
Vänskä conducting
August 7, 2013, Ravinia Festival.
Itzhak Perlman as soloist, Carlos
Miguel Prieto conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
solo violin, two flutes, two
oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, two horns, two
trumpets, timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
27 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1947. Mischa Elman as soloist,
Désiré Defauw conducting. RCA
1962. Nathan Milstein as soloist,
Walter Hendl conducting. VAI
(video)
1979. Kyung-Wha Chung
as soloist, Sir Georg Solti
conducting. London (video)
1980. Shlomo Mintz as soloist,
Claudio Abbado conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
1993. Itzhak Perlman as soloist,
Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Erato
Breitkopf & Härtel. “I very much
want to have your views on all this,”
he wrote, “before I turn it over to the
printer.” David gave the world premiere
on March 13, 1845, with the Leipzig
Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by
Danish composer Niels Gade. It was a
great success.
The concerto turned out to be
Mendelssohn’s last orchestral work, a
powerhouse finale to a career burdened
by the promise of spectacular early
accomplishment—even the Italian and
Scottish symphonies hadn’t surpassed the
masterpieces of his teens—the Octet
and the Overture to A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. In achievement and
popularity, the violin concerto proved to
be their equal.
T his violin concerto has long
been too well known for an
easy appraisal of its real virtues
and innovations. In 1921, Donald
Tovey wrote, “I rather envy the enjoyment of anyone who should hear the
Mendelssohn concerto for the first time
and find that, like Hamlet, it was full of
quotations.” Perhaps the most famous
of the quotations in the concerto is the
very opening, a wonderful, singing
violin melody launched after just two
measures of orchestral “curtain”—a
theme so effortlessly right that it
comes as a surprise to learn that it gave
Mendelssohn considerable trouble.
Although Mendelssohn wasn’t the
first composer to introduce his soloist at
the start of a concerto, he seized on the
happy idea of letting soloist and orchestra explore the exposition together,
abandoning the traditional double exposition (one for orchestra alone, a second
led by the soloist). The idea was part of
Mendelssohn’s design from the beginning, and it was followed by nearly every
nineteenth-century composer, except
for Brahms and Dvořák. Equally novel
(though less imitated) is Mendelssohn’s
decision to move the soloist’s cadenza
from the end of the movement to the
crucial juncture of the development
section and the recapitulation. The soloist now takes the spotlight at the most
dramatic moment in the movement—it’s
a powerful and satisfying tactic. The
cadenza concludes with a series of
arpeggios that continues even after the
orchestra bursts in with the main theme,
a reversal of their traditional roles.
Novelty shouldn’t overshadow the
music’s less historic moments. The first
movement is one of Mendelssohn’s
greatest creations—there’s evidence
of his fastidious craftsmanship and
inspiration in every bar. Notice, in particular, how he handles the important
change of key and mode (from minor to
major): the solo violin quickly descends
three octaves to its lowest G, where it
becomes the bass line to a new melody
in the clarinets and flutes.
In his own Scottish Symphony,
Mendelssohn had played with going
from one movement to another without
a break. He now conceives his entire
concerto, in three movements, as one
continuous flow of music. The first
bridge is accomplished by a single
note—a low B in the bassoon—that
outlasts the final chord of the opening
Allegro like a stuck key on a pipe organ.
The sustained B finally rises the half step
to C, suggesting a new key—C major—
and, in turn, a new movement.
The Andante is one of Mendelssohn’s
loveliest songs without words, a full
paragraph of sweet melody and sensitive
scoring. The mood darkens midway
through, with the entrance of trumpets
and timpani. The bridge to the finale is
accomplished by fourteen measures at
a transitional tempo, in the character
of a recitative before a showstopper
aria. This is truly virtuosic material—
roulades, scales, and rapid passage
work in virtually every measure—cast
in Mendelssohn’s characteristic fleet
and dancing style. The scurrying main
theme carries the day at the expense
of a little march tune that passes for a
second subject. There’s a fancy coda,
and, in the final bar, the soloist’s high E
pierces the stratosphere. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Gustav Mahler
Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia.
Died May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria.
Symphony No. 5
The lone trumpet call that
opens this symphony
launches a whole new
chapter in Mahler’s
music. Gone is the
picturesque world of the
first four symphonies—
music inspired by folk
tales and song, music that
calls on the human voice
and is explained by the written word. With the
Fifth Symphony, as Bruno Walter put it, Mahler
“is now aiming to write music as a musician.”
Walter had nothing against the earlier works; in
fact, he was one of the first serious musicians to
understand and to conduct those pieces long
before it was fashionable to champion the
composer’s cause. Walter simply identified what
other writers since have reemphasized: the
unforeseen switch to an exclusively instrumental
symphonic style, producing music, in
Symphonies nos. 5 through 7, that needs no
programmatic discussion.
In fact, the break in Mahler’s compositional
style is neither as clean nor as radical as we might
at first think. The trumpet call that opens this
symphony is a quotation from the climax of the
first movement of the Fourth Symphony—a
COMPOSED
1901–1902
FIRST PERFORMANCE
October 18, 1904; Cologne, Germany.
The composer conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 22 & 23, 1907, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting
July 20, 1978, Ravinia Festival.
Lawrence Foster conducting
4
direct link, in other words, with the world
Mahler has left behind. And Mahler has hardly
given up song for symphony. In fact, the new
focus on purely instrumental symphonies seems
to have freed Mahler to produce, at the same
time, an extraordinary outpouring of songs,
including most of his finest. And, although
they are not sung—or even directly quoted—in
Symphonies nos. 5 through 7, their presence, and
their immense importance to Mahler, is continually felt. The great lumbering march that strides
across the first movement of this symphony, for
example, shares much in spirit, contour, and
even detail with the first of the Kindertotenlieder
and the last of his Des Knaben Wunderhorn
settings, “Der Tamboursg’sell” (The drummer
boy), both written while the symphony also was
taking shape.
Mahler was a “summer composer,” as he put
it, compressing a year’s pent-up musical work
into the one holiday he enjoyed as a professional
conductor. “His life during the summer months,”
his wife Alma later recalled, “was stripped of all
dross, almost inhuman in its purity.” He wrote
night and day, and several projects took shape in
his head at once. In June of 1901, he settled in
a villa at Maiernigg on the Worthersee, where,
before the summer was over, he wrote four of the
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 6, 2007, Ravinia Festival. James
Conlon conducting
May 20, 21 & 22, 2010, Orchestra Hall.
Semyon Bychkov conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
four flutes and four piccolos, three
oboes and english horn, three
clarinets, bass clarinet and clarinet
in D, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, bass
drum, cymbals, small bass drum, snare
drum, glockenspiel, slapstick, tam-tam,
triangle, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
71 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1970. Georg Solti conducting. London
1980. Claudio Abbado conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
1986. Sir Georg Solti conducting. Sony
(video)
1990. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
1997. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Teldec
1997. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Arthaus Musik (video)
Rückert songs, three of the Kindertotenlieder (also
to texts by Rückert), and “Der Tamboursg’sell,”
and drafted two movements of his Fifth
Symphony. Each piece, dating from the same
time, shares something with the others—the
kind of cross-referencing that is at the heart of
Mahler’s working method.
Although Mahler left no scenario to follow
for this symphony—no outward sign that this
is explicit, programmatic music—it is so obviously dramatic music. For Donald Mitchell,
perhaps the most important Mahler scholar
writing today, the Fifth Symphony “initiates a
new concept of an interior drama.” The idea of
a programmatic symphony has not vanished, “it
has gone underground, rather, or inside.”
Mahler has even left us a few clues, not
dictating what the music should mean to us, but
suggesting what it meant to him. The central
scherzo is “a human being in the full light of
day, in the
prime of his
life.” And
the famous
Adagietto is,
if we believe
Willem
Mengelberg’s
assertion,
Gustav
Mahler’s declaration of his
love for Alma,
presented to
his wife withAlma Mahler
out a word
of explanation.
As in the later Seventh Symphony and the
projected Tenth, the Fifth Symphony is divided
into five movements. But more important are
the numbers defining three basic parts, with the
weighty scherzo standing alone in the middle.
Part 1 views life as tragedy, moving from the
bleak funeral march of the first movement to
the deflated climax of the second. The third part
approaches, and ultimately achieves, triumph.
Part 2, the lively scherzo, is the hinge upon
which the music shifts.
The first movement caused Mahler considerable trouble. He continued to retouch the
orchestration until 1907, three years after the
first performance, and as late as 1911, the last
year of his life, he said:
I cannot understand how I could have
written so much like a beginner. . . . Clearly
the routine I had acquired in the first four
symphonies had deserted me altogether, as
though a totally new message demanded a
new technique.
Mahler had written funeral marches before—
the first three symphonies all include them—but
this is a new kind of funeral music: tough as
nails, lean, scrubbed clean of simple pictorial
touches. It is a much more concise movement
than the tremendous march that opens the
Resurrection Symphony. Here the march gives
way to a defiant trio—a terrible outburst of grief;
then the cortege returns, followed by the trio,
now dragged down to the march’s slow, lumbering pace. Near the end there is a new idea, full
of yearning—a rising minor ninth falling to the
octave—that will find fulfillment in the second
movement, just as that movement will echo
things already developed here. The trumpet calls
the first movement to a close, in utter desolation.
The second movement is both a companion to
and a commentary on the first. It is predominately
angry and savage music, with periodic lapses into
the quieter, despairing music we have left behind.
There is one jarring moment, so characteristic
of Mahler, when all the grief and anger spills
over into sheer giddiness—a momentary indiscretion, like laughter at the graveside. The music
quickly regains its composure, but seems even
more disturbed. Near the end, the trumpets and
trombones begin a noble brass chorale, brave and
affirmative. For a moment it soars. And then, suddenly, almost inexplicably, it loses steam, falters,
and falls flat. It is one of Mahler’s cruelest jokes.
The great central scherzo caused problems at
the first rehearsal. From Cologne, Mahler wrote
to Alma:
The scherzo is the very devil of a movement. I see it is in for a peck of troubles!
Conductors for the next fifty years will all
take it too fast and make nonsense of it; and
the public—oh, heavens, what are they to
make of this chaos of which new worlds are
forever being engendered?
5
It is hard to know just how fast Mahler felt
this music should go—it is marked “vigorously,
not too fast”—and today his peculiar mixture of
ländler (a nice country dance) and waltz (more
upscale) seems neither chaotic nor nonsensical,
although it is still provocative. The whole is
an ebullient dance of life, with moments of
simple nostalgia, and, when the horns seem to
call across mountain valleys, an almost childlike wonder.
The much-loved Adagietto is really the introduction to the finale, incomplete on its own, not
so much musically as psychologically. Ironically,
for many years this was one of the few Mahler
excerpts ever played at concerts; it was later
borrowed, carelessly, as movie music for Death
in Venice, and won still more new converts. Here
Mahler finds a fresh kind of lyricism which he
gives not to the winds, which so often sang in
the earlier symphonies, but to the strings alone,
over the gentle, hesitant, almost improvisatory
strumming of the harp.
This must have been very persuasive to
audiences not yet ready for Mahler’s tougher,
more complex movements. But it is by no means
simple music, and although there are fewer notes
on the page than usual, Mahler is no less precise
in demanding how they should be played. (The
first three notes of the melody, for example, are
marked pianissimo, molto ritardando, espressivo,
and crescendo.) And, if this is a song without
words, it is intimately related to perhaps the
greatest of all Mahler songs, the Rückert setting
“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (I am
lost to the world), written that same summer.
© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
6
A single note from the horn—so fresh and
unexpected, with the sound of strings still in
our ears—calls us back to earth. The finale
begins at once with the suggestion of one of
the Wunderhorn melodies and then changes
direction. This is radiant music, so infectious that
part of the Adagietto even turns up, virtually
unrecognizable in these up-tempo surroundings.
Mahler’s Fifth is his Eroica, moving from tragedy
to triumph, and his triumph could not be more
sweeping. Ultimately, the same brass chorale
that fell to defeat in the second movement
enters and carries the finale to a proper,
rollicking conclusion.
Finally, a word about Mahler’s choice of key.
The Fifth Symphony begins in C-sharp minor
and ends five movements later in D major. Until
Mahler’s time, it was customary to begin and
end in the same key (or to finish in the relative
major if the piece started in the minor), and
some of Mahler’s symphonies do that. But many
do not, and this kind of progressive tonality,
as it is often called, is an essential part of his
musical language, an example of how he helped
to stretch the boundaries and the meaning of
tonality. In the Fifth Symphony, it underlines the
“inner drama” of the music: the struggle to rise
from C-sharp to D, and from minor to major,
underlines the music’s quest to rise from tragedy
to victory. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
PROFILE
Donald Runnicles Conductor
Donald
Runnicles
concurrently is
general music
director of the
Deutsche Oper
Berlin (DOB);
chief conductor
of the BBC
Scottish
Symphony Orchestra; and music
director of the Grand Teton Music
Festival in Jackson, Wyoming. He also
is principal guest conductor of the
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Runnicles
enjoys close and enduring relationships
with several of the world’s most significant opera companies and orchestras.
He is especially celebrated for his
interpretations of romantic and
post-romantic symphonic and opera
repertoires, which are core to his
musical identity.
The current season’s highlights
include a new production of Berlioz’s
Les Troyens at San Francisco Opera;
new productions at the DOB of
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
and Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, along
with eight revival titles; and guest
conducting engagements with the Berlin
Philharmonic, London Symphony
Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich,
and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Prior posts include music director
of the San Francisco Opera from 1992
to 2008, where, during his tenure,
Runnicles led the world premieres of
John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, Conrad
Susa’s The Dangerous Liaisons, and
the U.S. premiere of Messiaen’s Saint
François d’Assise; chief conductor of
the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New
York; and general music director of the
Freiburg theater and orchestra from
1989 until 1993.
Runnicles’s recent recording of
Wagner arias with Jonas Kaufmann
and the DOB Orchestra won the 2013
Gramophone Award for best vocal
recording. His extensive discography contains complete recordings of
Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Britten’s
Billy Budd, Humperdinck’s Hansel
and Gretel, and Bellini’s I Capuleti e i
Montecchi, as well as Mozart’s Requiem,
Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony.
Donald Runnicles was awarded the
Order of the British Empire in 2004.
He holds honorary degrees from the
University of Edinburgh, the Royal
Scottish Academy of Music and Drama,
and the San Francisco Conservatory
of Music.
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
April 27, 28, 29, 30 & May 2, 1995, Orchestra Hall.
Mozart’s Symphony no. 39 and Holst’s The Planets
July 11, 1997, Ravinia Festival. Elgar’s In the South
Overture, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4 with
Menahem Pressler, and Mendelssohn’s Symphony
no. 3
MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES
April 15, 16, 17, 18 & 21, 1998, Orchestra Hall.
Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, Haydn’s Cello Concerto in
D major with John Sharp, Pärt’s Cantus in Memory
of Benjamin Britten, and Britten’s Variations on a
Theme of Frank Bridge
July 7, 2000, Ravinia Festival. Cimarosa’s Concerto
for Two Flutes with James Galway and Jeanne
Galway, Mozart’s Flute Concerto no. 2 with James
Galway, and Elgar’s Symphony no. 1