PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SECOND 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, May 23, 2013, at 8:00
Friday, May 24, 2013, at 1:30
Saturday, May 25, 2013, at 8:00
Tuesday, May 28, 2013, at 7:30
Carlos Miguel Prieto Conductor
Jean-Yves Thibaudet Piano
Ginastera
Suite from Panambí, Op. 1a
Claro de luna sobre el Paraná
Invocación a los espíritus poderosos
Lamento de las doncellas
Fiesta indígena—Ronda de las doncellas—Danza de los guerreros
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
Saint-Saëns
Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major, Op. 103 (Egyptian)
Allegro animato
Andante—Allegretto tranquillo quasi andantino
Molto allegro
JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET
INTERMISSION
Revueltas
La noche de los mayas
Noche de los mayas
Noche de jaranas
Noche de Yucatán—
Noche de encantamiento
These concerts are part of the CSOA’s 2012–13 Rivers Festival, which is supported in part by
an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The CSO thanks Rhoda Lea and Henry S. Frank for their generous support of these concerts.
Friday’s matinee concert is endowed in part by Elaine Frank, in memory of Zollie Frank.
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 DANIEL
PHILLIP JAFFÉ
HUSCHERPHILLIP HUSCHER
Alberto Ginastera
Born April 11, 1916, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Died June 25, 1983, Geneva, Switzerland.
Suite from Panambí, Op. 1a
B
y the turn of the twentieth
century, Argentina had nurtured a number of composers who
attempted to create an indigenous
style of music for the concert hall.
One leading example was Alberto
Williams (1862–1952), creator of no
less than 110 opus numbers, who
incorporated in his music the dotted
rhythms and syncopations of the
folk milonga. However, his Parisian
training and his over-fastidious
academic style makes him appear,
from today’s perspective, more
of a John the Baptist figure to
Argentina’s first great composer,
Alberto Ginastera. Williams was
nonetheless an important precursor,
who not only encouraged musical
nationalism, but also founded the
Buenos Aires Conservatory—later
named the Conservatorio Williams.
It was in this institution that the
COMPOSED
1935–1937
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 27, 1937,
Buenos Aires
These are the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra’s
first performances
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twelve-year-old Ginastera was
admitted in 1928, graduating with
a gold medal in composition in
1935. Ginastera then studied at the
National Conservatory from 1936
to 1938. It was during his time
there that he composed his “choreographic legend” Panambí.
Completed in 1937, this became
Ginastera’s op. 1. A suite of four
dances from the ballet were
conducted by Juan José Castro at
the Teatro Colón on November 27
of that year. With its evocative
orchestration—now seductive,
now punchy and exciting—and its
rhythmic verve, the suite became
an immediate hit, establishing
Ginastera as a major new talent.
When his ballet was first performed complete in 1940, it caught
the attention of the New York
ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein,
INSTRUMENTATION
four flutes and two piccolos,
three oboes and english
horn, four clarinets, E-flat
clarinet and bass clarinet,
four bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four
trumpets, three trombones
and tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, piano,
celesta, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
12 minutes
who commissioned Ginastera’s
next major work, Estancia, and so
raised his international profile. Yet,
unlike the Brazilian Villa-Lobos,
Ginastera was—in the words of
the American composer Aaron
Copland—“modest almost to the
timid degree” and intensely selfcritical, completing only fifty-five
opus numbers in his entire career.
But what Ginastera wrote is some
of the best-crafted, yet exuberant
music of the last century, of which
Panambí was his powerful overture.
G
inastera’s ballet is based on a
pre-Columbian saga involving love and magic, related by
the Guaraní Indians who live
around the headwaters of the Rio
Paraná in northern Argentina.
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is an
obvious precursor of the ballet’s
furious discords and percussiveness,
yet there is a sultry tenderness, too,
in the string writing, which owes
something both to Falla and the
Ravel of Daphnis and Chloe. One
may also detect Bartók’s influence
in the ballet’s preoccupation with
night and magic, notably in Claro
de luna sobre el Paraná (Moonlight
on the Parana) and Invocación a los
espíritus poderosos (Invocation of the
powerful spirits)—themes which
were to become typical elements
in Ginastera’s music. The four
movements are: Moonlight on the
Parana, Invocation of the Powerful
Spirits, Lament of the Maidens,
and Native Festival—Round Dance
of the Maidens—Dance.
Daniel Jaffé
IMAGE COURTESY OF RICHARD WASSERMAN, PHOTOGRAPHER, FROM MIDSTREAM: THE CHICAGO RIVER, 1999–2010 PUBLISHED BY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO PRESS, 2012
PLEASE VISIT WWW.RICHARDWASSERMAN.NET.
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Camille Saint-Saëns
Born October 9, 1835, Paris, France.
Died December 16, 1921, Algiers, Algeria.
Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major, Op. 103
(Egyptian)
T
here was little love lost between
Camille Saint-Saëns and Claude
Debussy. The composer of The
Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun
once claimed the senior French
composer had betrayed the hope of
younger composers by failing “to
satisfy their longing for freedom and
the open air”—a somewhat piquant
irony, since Saint-Saëns actually was
fond of sailing on the open sea and
of exploring exotic countries outside
Europe. In several of his works,
Saint-Saëns incorporated the sounds
and rhythms he heard in North
African towns and cities. Indeed,
Debussy, aware of Saint-Saëns’s
fondness for travel, acidly suggested
that Saint-Saëns might give up the
profession of composer and more
profitably become an explorer.
Saint-Saëns was not fond of
Parisian winters. In his later
years, he often retreated during those months to the warmer
climes of Egypt, where he had
COMPOSED
1896
FIRST PERFORMANCE
May 6, 1896, Paris. The
composer as pianist
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at his disposal several palaces in
which he could compose in peace
and luxury. Early in 1896, aged
sixty, he finished his Fifth Piano
Concerto, partly composed in the
Egyptian town of Luxor—hence its
nickname “Egyptian” (not given by
Saint-Saëns himself). Still master of
a technique younger pianists might
have envied, Saint-Saëns himself
played the solo part at the concerto’s
premiere on May 6; this was held
as part of a jubilee concert at the
Salle Pleyel celebrating the fiftieth
anniversary of his prodigious debut
as pianist there. The concerto
subsequently was championed by its
dedicatee, the composer’s piano duo
partner Louis Diémer, and quickly
became a part of the standard
repertory. Le Monde musical’s critic,
Edward Mangeot, praised the
concerto in hyperbolic terms:
It is from Rubens, from
Raphael, from Michelangelo,
FIRST CSO
PERFORMANCE
April 2, 1915, Orchestra Hall.
Ferruccio Busoni, piano;
Frederick Stock conducting
MOST RECENT CSO
PERFORMANCE
February 20, 1990, Orchestra
Hall. Lorin Hollander, piano;
Neeme Järvi conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
solo piano, two flutes and
piccolo, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons,
four horns, two trumpets,
three trombones, timpani,
percussion, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
29 minutes
for one finds in it fantasy,
grace, and power, and the listener admires at the same time
the incomparable structure,
chief quality of the greatest
musician of our time, and this
prodigious imagination which
gives us new and singularly
captivating impressions.
Yet it was precisely such “new and
singularly captivating impressions”
which soon had other critics up in
arms. Saint-Saëns had a voracious
appetite for various kinds of music
(Debussy’s a notable exception),
equally happy taking inspiration
from Schumann and Handel as he
was from the folk music of Egypt,
the latter his source for “new
impressions” heard particularly in
the second movement. Effectively
an aural travelogue of places as far
afield as the Nile, Spain, and—
according to Saint-Saëns himself—
the Far East, that central movement
was considered by more seriousminded critics an interloper in a
Western form exalted by the masterpieces of Mozart and Beethoven.
Yet Saint-Saëns’s work was greatly
admired by no less a composer than
Ravel: not only did the younger
composer further develop such
travelogue elements in his own
Sheherazade, Miroirs, and Chansons
madécasses, but arguably he built
on Saint-Saëns’s achievement in
his two celebrated piano concertos,
both richly evocative tapestries of
different places and musical styles—
except Ravel was canny enough not
to explicitly name their sources.
Another element which dominates Saint-Saëns’s concerto is
water. In the first movement, as the
soloist plays aqueous figuration,
horns and woodwind pulse a chord
in a manner reminiscent of the
allegro third movement of Handel’s
Water Music—also, as it happens,
in F major. The central movement
includes what Saint-Saëns described
to Diémer as “a Nubian love song
that I heard sung by the boatmen on
the Nile when I was going downstream in a dahabieh.” And the final
movement Saint-Saëns explicitly
described as
capturing “the
joy of a sea
crossing, a joy
that not everyone shares!”
T
he
concerto
opens with
sustained
woodwind
chords, followed by the
Saint-Saëns’s piano duo
soloist playing partner Louis Diémer,
a gently lilting to whom the composer dedicated his Egyptian Concerto
theme, soon
taken up by
high strings and woodwinds (maybe
half-remembered by Leonard
Bernstein when, sixty years later,
he composed the dance which
precedes “Somewhere” in West Side
Story!). After those pulsing horn
and woodwind chords, so reminiscent of the Allegro in Handel’s
F major Water Music, the music
becomes more excited and bubbling, the pianist’s cascading figuration soon taken up by the orchestra.
Eventually the soloist introduces a
lovely minor-key theme, though it
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is the opening lilting theme which
predominates in the development
section, albeit in stern minor-key
form. In recapitulation, flutes and
strings resume the opening theme
in its sunnier guise. After a climax,
the music winds down to a gentle
flow—as if drifting lazily in a boat
on sun-dappled water.
An arresting tutti chord opens
the second movement. Against a
rhythmic string accompaniment,
the soloist then launches a bold
arabesque in an “oriental” mode,
whose distinctive flattened second
and raised third degrees are characteristic of the archetypical “Arab”
scale. Another tutti chord, and the
soloist plays an improvisatory-style
recitation on the Arabic scale.
Then, in a softer passage, comes
one of Saint-Saëns’s most striking
sonorities: the soloist plays a melody
mezzo forte in the left hand while
the right hand doubles it pianissimo a twelfth and an eighteenth
above, so reinforcing its harmonic
series and making the piano sound
strange and exotic. (Ravel long had
Saint-Saëns’s concerto on his piano,
and later composed a similar passage in “harmonics” as one of the
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iterations of his theme in Bolero.)
After the “Nubian love song,”
played first by the piano and then
by the cellos to genuinely charming
effect, we are abruptly taken to the
Far East, the soloist playing a pentatonic theme with perhaps a hint
of gamelan in the clashing seconds
(though the composer claimed that
these represented chirping crickets
and croaking frogs). Then follows
a rapid strumming, suggesting the
fiery style of flamenco. The effect of
the whole movement is of flipping
through a photo album compiled
by an enthusiastic traveler such as
Saint-Saëns was.
Saint-Saëns himself suggested
that the finale celebrated the experience of sailing across a sea: the
soloist’s low “chugging” with which
it opens possibly depicts a ship’s
mighty turbines starting up. Most
delightful, though, is a secondary
theme first heard lightly skipping
in the soloist’s part, a joyous sound
Saint-Saëns possibly learned from
Borodin and which looks forward
to Poulenc in his most charmingly
sentimental mood.
Daniel Jaffé
Silvestre Revueltas
Born December 31, 1899, Durango, Mexico.
Died October 5, 1940, Mexico City, Mexico.
La noche de los mayas
(The night of the Mayas)
B
orn on the last day of the
nineteenth century, Silvestre
Revueltas helped to lead the music
of Mexico into a new era. His was a
brief, difficult, and colorful life. He
lived and worked in Mexico City;
Mobile, Alabama; San Antonio,
Texas; and Chicago. He fought
for the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War, periodically spent time
in mental institutions, and died
of alcoholism at the age of forty.
Revueltas did not begin to compose
seriously until the last ten years of
his life, and his career is largely one
of unfulfilled promise. He is something of a tragic figure, like the
alcoholic hero of Under the Volcano,
the Mexican novel by Malcolm
Lowry, who lived in Cuernavaca
during Revueltas’s final years.
“I do not think I was a child
prodigy,” Revueltas has written,
“but I showed some inclination
COMPOSED
1939, as film score
FIRST PERFORMANCE
January 31, 1960;
Guadalajara, Mexico
FIRST CSO
PERFORMANCE
November 13, 1997,
Orchestra Hall. Christopher
Wilkins conducting
for music quite early, as the result
of which I became a professional
musician.” Silvestre started to play
the violin at the age of seven, and at
thirteen, he went to Mexico City to
study violin and composition. Three
years later, he decided to further his
studies abroad—not in Europe, but
in the United States, first at Saint
Edward College in Austin, Texas,
and then, for two years beginning in 1918, at Chicago Musical
College, where he studied violin
under Sametini and composition
under Felix Borowski, who also
was the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony. (The Orchestra
did not play Revueltas’s music until
after Borowski’s death in 1956,
denying him the pleasure of writing
about his own student’s progress.)
Revueltas returned to Mexico
in 1920, and, although he later
spent more time in Chicago and
MOST RECENT CSO
PERFORMANCE
July 22, 2001, Harrison
Park, Pilsen (first
movement only). Daniel
Barenboim conducting
timpani, bongos, deep conga,
tom-tom, güiro, rattle,
woodblocks, bass drum,
indian drum, drums with and
without snares, tam-tam,
xylophone, piano, strings
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and two piccolos,
two oboes, two clarinets,
two E-flat clarinets and
bass clarinet, two bassoons,
four horns, three trumpets,
two trombones and tuba,
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
36 minutes
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elsewhere in this country, Mexico
remained his home for the rest of
his life. In 1929, Carlos Chávez,
an influential composer, conductor, and pianist, asked Revueltas to
serve as the assistant conductor of
the Mexico Symphony Orchestra.
(They had toured together in the
mid-twenties, giving twenty-six
recitals of music for violin and
piano.) Revueltas settled in Mexico
City, became one of the principal
players in the development of
musical life there, and began to
devote more of his time to serious composition.
In many ways, Revueltas was
a self-made composer. Despite
his training in conservatories in
Mexico City and Chicago, he
always said he never learned much
there, but later “found better
teachers in the Mexican people and
my country.” He remained indifferent to many of the conventions
of music and musical form. The
novelist and composer Paul Bowles
has remarked how Revueltas
epitomized the true revolutionary
to a younger generation of Mexican
musicians because he “went straight
toward the thing to be said, paying
as little attention as possible to the
means of saying it.”
Revueltas’s musical style draws
from many sources. “I like all kinds
of music,” he said. “I can even stand
some of the classics, and some of
my own works, but I prefer the
music of the people of the ranches
and villages of my country.” The
way his compositions reflect the
music of Mexico and the spirit
of its people has always attracted
notice. “I have never used popular
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or folkloric themes,” he said, by way
of clarification, “but most of the
tunes, or rather motifs that I have
used, have a popular character.”
Like the great Spaniard Manuel
de Falla, Revueltas’s absorption of
his country’s indigenous style is
complete. As Paul Bowles writes,
“there was an intuition functioning that transformed folk music
into art music with a minimum of
purity lost.”
Revueltas’s major works, all
dating from the 1930s—he completed his first orchestral score,
Cuauhnahuac, in 1930—include his
Homage to García Lorca, written in
memory of the murdered Spanish
poet, and Sensemayá, which was
recorded by Leonard Bernstein and
the New York Philharmonic.
L
a noche de los mayas, composed
in 1939, is one of Revueltas’s
many film scores. (The successful
Hollywood composer Alex North
was a friend and disciple of his.)
Like Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky,
La noche de los mayas has outlived
its original use. (In fact, the motion
picture has been out of circulation for many years.) From the
thirty-six musical passages written
for the film, conductor José Ives
Limantour has arranged four sections to form the suite performed at
these concerts.
Revueltas’s commanding sense of
style is remarkable in the panoramic
sweep of the first movement, the
picturesque color of the Noche
de jaranas (Night of revelry), the
seductive and atmospheric Night
of the Yucatan, and the convulsive
finale, which follows without
schools and celebrated composers—
it is pure, prime Revueltas.
Phillip Huscher
Daniel Jaffé is a regular contributor
to BBC Music Magazine and a specialist in English and Russian music.
He is the author of a biography of
Sergey Prokofiev (Phaidon) and the
Historical Dictionary of Russian Music
(Scarecrow Press).
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
© 2013 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
pause—a Night of Enchantment
forged over the rousing counterpoint of more than a dozen
percussion instruments. With
its perpetual stream of intricate,
rhythmic patterns that surge, fade
into silence, and even break loose in
passages of free improvisation, the
Night of Enchantment is a powerful example of Revueltas’s individuality. It is as original as anything
in European music of the time,
but it owes nothing to their distant
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