Program
ONe HuNDReD TWeNTieTH SeaSON
Chicago Symphony orchestra
riccardo muti Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor emeritus
Yo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Thursday, December 16, 2010, at 3:00
Friday, December 17, 2010, at 1:30
Saturday, December 18, 2010, at 8:00
The Chicago Symphony orchestra Brass
Dale Clevenger Conductor
michael mulcahy Conductor
mark ridenour Conductor
gabrieli
From Sacrae symphoniae (1597)
Canzon duodecimi toni à 10
Sonata pian e forte
Canzon septimi toni à 8 (No. 2)
Bach, arr. Crees
Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582
grainger, arr. Higgins
Lincolnshire Posy
Lisbon
Horkstow Grange
Rufford Park Poachers
The Brisk Young Sailor
Lord Melbourne
The Lost Lady Found
InTermISSIon
(continued)
Wagner, arr. Jeurissen
Tristan Fantasy
revueltas, arr. roberts
Sensemayá
Prokofiev, arr. Kreines
Three Scenes from Romeo and Juliet
The Montagues and the Capulets
Dance
The Death of Tybalt
These concerts are part of Mexico in Chicago 2010, a citywide celebration of the bicentennial
of Mexico’s independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution.
Steinway is the official piano of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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CommenTS BY PHiLLiP HuSCHeR
L
ong before there were symphonies or orchestras to play
them, there was a rich tradition of music for ensembles of
brass instruments. Fanfares (possibly derived from the Arabic
word anfár, for trumpets) have been played as long as there
has been royalty to announce and battles to be won. So-called
tower music (with groups of cornets, trumpets, and trombones
playing from the tower of the local church or town hall) was
wildly popular beginning in the sixteenth century. Arguably,
the first composer to make important and lasting art music
writing for various combinations of brass instruments was
Giovanni Gabrieli, who was born in Venice, Italy, circa 1555
and died there in 1612. After he became organist at Saint
Mark’s Basilica in 1584, and at the Scuola Grande di San
Rocco the following year, he began to compose works of a
magnificence to match the architectural splendor of those two
institutions. His first volume of Sacrae symphoniae, published in
1597, is a landmark of Venetian music—a collection of motets
and canzoni for brass ensembles that established the foundation
of brass music for years to come. The two canzoni performed at
this concert—the first for ten and the second for eight individual parts—are marvels of music that exploits various combinations of instruments and ever-changing textures in addition to
the antiphonal dialogue between phrases Gabrieli intended to
echo across the dazzling mosaic-covered spaces of Saint Mark’s.
The famous Sonata pian e forte, as its name implies, explores
dialogue and dynamic contrast—at a time when dynamic indications were not yet regularly written into scores.
J
ohann Sebastian Bach—like Giovanni Gabrieli, a member
of a large musical dynasty—was widely regarded as a phenomenon in his own lifetime, particularly in the works he composed for organ. The obituary published in 1754 boldly claims
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that “our Bach was the most prodigious organist and keyboard
player that there has ever been.” Although he wrote important keyboard music throughout his entire creative life, the C
minor passacaglia and fugue he composed in the years around
1710 stands out as one of the supreme masterworks of baroque
music. Bach’s repeating ostinato is an eight-measure theme; as
Robert Schumann said, more than a century after the piece was
composed, the twenty variations that follow are “intertwined
so ingeniously that one can never cease to be amazed.” After
the passacaglia, Bach writes a double fugue—the opening half
of the passacaglia theme is the first fugal subject, a transformation of the other half is the second. The Passacaglia and Fugue
has been adapted for myriad uses over the years—including,
famously, in the baptism scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather; it has been transcribed for orchestra by Leopold
Stokowski and Ottorino Respighi, and adopted by pianists and
jazz musicians. But not even the full resources of the symphony
orchestra convey the clarity, contrapuntal complexity, and
clarion power of this music better than brass ensemble.
A
lthough he was born in Australia in 1882, Percy Grainger
made his career in London, where he settled in 1901, and
later in New York. It was during his years in England that he
became fascinated by folk music, which, for him, served as
models of memorable tune writing. Most of his own compositions, in fact, are folk song settings, none of them more popular
than Lincolnshire Posy, which he composed for wind band in
1937. This collection of “musical wildflowers” is based on folk
music he collected in Lincolnshire, England, in 1905 and 1906.
Each of the movements is a musical portrait of the singer who
sang its original melody. Grainger begins with Lisbon, a sailor’s
song, followed by the tragic Horkstow Grange, named for an
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eighteenth-century farmhouse where a young workman clubbed
his abusive overseer; Rufford Park Poachers, which was deemed
too difficult to be played at the work’s premiere; The Brisk
Young Sailor, a simple love song; Lord Melbourne, a dark war
song; and The Lost Lady Found, a quick dance song that tells
the story of a woman stolen by gypsies.
T
he works of Richard Wagner, the most daring and revolutionary of nineteenth-century composers, inevitably bring
to mind rich and lavish orchestral writing on a scale previously
unknown in music. In his seminal music drama—arguably the
most influential composition of
the romantic era—Tristan and
Isolde, Wagner in fact gave the
orchestra a role as important to
the unfolding of the story as that
of the singers. But the essence
of Wagner’s music in Tristan
and Isolde isn’t its sonic splendor,
but harmony, the visionary use
of dissonance, and the ability
of instrumental music alone to
convey a sense of drama. All
of those qualities are captured
by just six horns in the fantasy
on music from Tristan arranged
by Dutch horn player Herman
Richard Wagner. Oil painting by Friedrich
Jeurissen. The fantasy is also a
Pecht, 1864–65
fitting reminder that Wagner
himself was one of the greatest
writers for the horn, keenly attuned to its unique color world
and to the sheer beauty of its sound.
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B
orn on the last day of the nineteenth century, Silvestre
Revueltas helped to lead the music of Mexico into a new era.
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.
After early training in Mexico City, 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 was also the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony. Revueltas returned to Mexico in 1920, and,
although he later spent more time in Chicago, and elsewhere in
this country, Mexico remained his home for the rest of his life.
Sensemayá—like all Revueltas’s major works, it dates from the
1930s—is the composer’s masterpiece: a riveting instrumental
rendering of the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillen’s tale about a
ritual Afro-Caribbean chant performed while killing a snake.
Originally written for small orchestra and later expanded,
Revueltas’s score loses nothing in Bruce Roberts’s transcription for brass, clarinet, string bass, and percussion, because the
essence of the music is momentum, drama, and the relentless
rhythmic drive of a very active percussion section.
D
uring Sergei Prokofiev’s last trip to Chicago, in January 1937,
he led the Chicago Symphony in selections from his new,
still unstaged ballet, Romeo and Juliet. This was the composer’s
fifth visit to Chicago, and he clearly felt at home: shortly after he
arrived in town, he sat down with a Tribune reporter and talked
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Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
© 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
freely while eating apple pie at a downtown luncheonette. He told the Tribune
that his Romeo and Juliet featured the
kind of “new melodic line” that he
thought would prove to be the salvation of modern music—one, he said,
that would have immediate appeal, yet
sound like nothing written before. “Of
all the moderns,” the Herald Examiner
critic wrote after hearing Romeo and
Juliet later in the week, “this tall and
boyish Russian has the most definite
gift of melody, the most authentic
contrapuntal technic [sic], and displays
Prokofiev in Chicago
the subtlest and most imaginative use
of dissonance.”
Chicago was the first American city to hear music from
Romeo and Juliet (following recent performances in Moscow and
Paris), and not for the only time in Prokofiev’s career, orchestral
excerpts were premiered before the ballet itself had been staged.
Three of the most popular selections from the complete score
are performed this week, in an arrangement for brass, timpani,
and percussion. The first is The Montagues and the Capulets—
menacing music to depict the warring families, introduced
by the prince’s powerful order to preserve peace. The opening
chords, which seem to grow in intensity to the breaking point,
set a tone of sorrow and inevitable tragedy. After one of the
liveliest dances from the ballet, we close with Tybalt’s Death,
which is tightly packed with incident and action and is almost
cinematic in the way it compresses events into a short time.
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