PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Friday, April 21, 2017, at 7:30
Edman Memorial Chapel, Wheaton College
Neeme Järvi Conductor
Robert Chen Violin
Pärt
Fratres
ROBERT CHEN
Bartók
Violin Concerto No. 1
Andante sostenuto
Allegro giocoso
ROBERT CHEN
INTERMISSION
Beethoven
Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral)
Awakening of Happy Feelings on Arriving in the Country: Allegro ma non troppo
Scene by the Brook: Andante molto mosso
Merry Gathering of Country Folk: Allegro—
Thunderstorm: Allegro—
Shepherd’s Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm: Allegretto
Presented in cooperation with Wheaton College and the Wheaton College Artist Series.
This performance is generously sponsored by the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation.
The appearance of Maestro Neeme Järvi is made possible by the Juli Plant Grainger Fund
for Artistic Excellence.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Arvo Pärt
Born September 11, 1935; Paide, Estonia
Fratres
Arvo Pärt stopped
writing music in 1968.
During the next eight
years, after turning away
from composing the
dramatic twelve-tone
works for which he was
well known in his native
Estonia, he began to
study medieval music.
This self-imposed exile brought about one of the
most remarkable stylistic changes a composer can
undergo. When Pärt finally broke his silence in
1976, it was with a tiny, astonishingly spare piano
piece, Für Alina, a quiet and unassuming score of
extremely high and low notes, sounding like
distant bells. (This music recalls Pärt’s childhood
experiments on the family piano, a huge concert
grand with a damaged middle register, which
forced him to play only at the top and bottom of
the keyboard.) “That was the first piece that was
on a new plateau,” Pärt says. “It was here that I
discovered the triad series, which I made my
simple, little guiding rule.”
The music that has followed—and made him
a cult figure—is austere and meditative, suffused
with a stillness and a gentle strength that set it
apart not only from Pärt’s earlier work (“It’s as if
it’s by another person,” he says), but from almost
any music ever written. Because he uses so few
notes and so much repetition, in a largely tonal
context, he often has been labeled a minimalist.
But Pärt’s quiet, nuanced, and deeply emotional
voice has little in common with the bracing
urban sound world of such composers as Philip
Glass or Steve Reich. (“Am I really a minimalist?” Pärt long ago asked, with customary
detachment. “It’s not something that concerns
me.”) Instead, Pärt has picked his own word,
tintinnabuli, from the Latin for “bells,” to label
his work.
Pärt has steadfastly refused to talk about his
own music in detail. (“Franz Schubert explained
nothing,” he once said. “He wrote songs. They
are the best explaining.”) He admits few specific
influences, although the death of Benjamin
Britten late in 1976 affected him deeply at the
time he was beginning to compose again. (“I had
just discovered Britten for myself,” Pärt remembers. “Just before his death, I began to appreciate
the unusual purity of his music.”) His few,
carefully chosen words about his own born-again
simplicity are often quoted:
I have discovered that it is enough when a
single note is beautifully played. This one
note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence,
comforts me. I work with very few elements,
with one voice, with two voices. I build with
the most primitive materials—with the triad
with one specific tonality.
Pärt made those comments in 1977, the year
he composed two of his signature works, Tabula
rasa, which, as its title suggests, was written
on the blank slate of his newfound style, and
the first in an extended family of pieces called
Fratres (Brothers).
Pärt composed the original version of Fratres,
scored for quintets of winds and strings, in
Above: Pärt, by photographer Eric Marinitsch, with whom he has collaborated since the 1990s. Marinitsch’s
collection of photographs and video of the composer, dating from 1997 to the present, was recently donated to the
Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, near Tallinn, Estonia. © Universal Edition / Eric Marinitsch
COMPOSED
1977 (original version for quintets of
winds and strings)
1992 (version for solo violin, strings,
and percussion)
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INSTRUMENTATION
solo violin, strings, percussion
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
11 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
May 6, 7, and 8, 2004, Orchestra Hall.
Yuan-Qing Yu as soloist, Christoph
von Dohnányi conducting
1977, for the Estonian early music ensemble
Hortus Musicus. On a commission from the
Salzburg Festival, he wrote variations on this
work for violin and piano in 1980. Fratres has
remained a touchstone for Pärt; he has returned
to it again and again, and he has continued to
find new things in it. Fratres also represents a
point of stability, a kind of musical home base,
even as Pärt and his family immigrated, first to
Vienna and then to Berlin. Like Bach’s Art of
Fugue, Fratres has no single definitive instrumentation. This is music of ideas rather than
concrete sounds. But where Bach left the choice
up to performers, Pärt has continued to prepare
editions of the work for different combinations
of players. His publisher currently offers sixteen different versions, arranged or authorized
by Pärt. The one performed this week, scored
for solo violin, strings, and percussion, dates
from 1992.
A ll the members of the Fratres family
share the same essential elements: a
low-lying open fifth is sustained like
a drone throughout the piece, while higher
instruments play variations on an austere
theme; the variations, which grow to a climax and then gradually recede, are separated
by tiny episodes of single, percussive notes
or chords, like the ticking of a clock or a
heartbeat. In the version performed at these
concerts, a solo violin begins the piece with a
prelude of arpeggios and then offers soaring
lines of commentary above the hymnlike
theme. Sound eventually gives way to silence,
but the music’s heartbeat continues. Béla Bartók
Born March 25, 1881; Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (now part of Romania)
Died September 26, 1945; New York City
Violin Concerto No. 1
Bartók didn’t ever expect
this work to be performed. But in 1958,
almost thirteen years after
his death and little more
than a year after the death
of a sixty-nine-year-old
violinist named Stefi
Geyer, it was played for
the first time, and their
private concerto became public property.
Stefi Geyer and Béla Bartók met in the spring
of 1907. He was twenty-six and a promising
composer (he had not yet written any of the
music for which he is famous today). She was
nineteen, beautiful, and an unusually gifted
violinist. They became friends at once, and
quickly fell in love. Bartók’s letters to Geyer
are as intimate and revealing as any he wrote,
although they often dwell on the awkward—and
fateful—schism between her devout Catholicism
and his atheism.
Bartók jotted down the first eleven measures
of this concerto on July 1, 1907, while spending
time with the Geyer family in the Hungarian
provinces. Later that same month, he set out
on his first important trip collecting folk songs
in Transylvania. (He wrote to Stefi about the
women who were too shy and suspicious to sing
into his portable Edison recorder.) That summer, inspired by the discovery of a new world of
music and the promise of their love, he began to
compose this violin concerto for Stefi to play.
“This is your leitmotif,” he wrote to her in
mid-September, notating the rising chain of
thirds with which the concerto opens. And he
discussed with her the ideas behind the two
movements he was composing then, as well as a
finale he had planned. But Bartók never wrote a
third movement, and Geyer never played “her”
concerto. On February 14, he received a letter
from her breaking off their relationship. That
same day, he began the thirteenth in a new set
of bagatelles, a Lento funèbre subtitled “Elle est
Above: Bartók, on his high school graduation in 1899
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morte.” The next month, he composed a fourteenth bagatelle that’s an angry and grotesque
waltz (inspiring Amy Lowell to write, in her
poem “After Hearing a Waltz by Bartók”: My
ears rack and throb with his cry, / And his eyes goggle
under his hair, / As my fingers sink into the fair /
White skin of his throat”).
Although for a while Bartók tried to interest
other violinists in the two-movement concerto,
he soon decided to
reuse the music in
other pieces and to
keep the concerto
a secret (the original manuscript
remained in Geyer’s
possession until her
death in December
1956). Recycling
the concerto made
musical sense, but it
was less successful
as therapy. In his
last letter to Geyer,
Stefi Geyer in 1904—
Bartók mentioned
Bartók’s unrequited passion
that he had begun a
for her is reflected in much
string quartet—the
of his music of the period.
first in his landmark
series—that incorporated the theme of the
concerto’s second movement. “This is my funeral
dirge,” he wrote. In 1911, the concerto’s first
movement, slightly revised and now anonymously
entitled Portrait, was performed in Budapest. (It
was published later that year as the first of Two
Portraits, op. 5; the second is an orchestration of
the fourteenth bagatelle.) And with that, the violin concerto was effectively erased from Bartók’s
output—it’s not listed among the composer’s
COMPOSED
July 1, 1907–February 5, 1908
FIRST PERFORMANCE
opening movement: February 12,
1911; Budapest, Hungary
complete: May 30, 1958; Basel,
Switzerland
INSTRUMENTATION
solo violin, two flutes and piccolo, two
oboes and english horn, two clarinets
and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four
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works in the catalog Zoltán Kodály prepared in
1921, nor in the official pamphlet compiled under
Bartók’s supervision in 1939.
The two movements of this concerto reveal
Bartók’s fondness at the time for contrasting
pairs, as in the related Two Portraits or the Two
Pictures, op. 10. Bartók characterized the first
movement as the “idealized Stefi Geyer, celestial
and inward,” and the second as a portrait of her
“cheerful, witty, amusing” side. Geyer later said
they pitted “the young girl whom he had loved”
with “the violinist whom he had admired.”
(His original idea for a third movement, never
explored, was to portray the “indifferent, cool,
and silent Stefi Geyer.”)
B artók himself said the first movement
was “the most direct” music he had yet
composed, “written exclusively from
the heart.” This is music of unrestrained passion, laced with Stefi’s leitmotif of yearning.
(Bartók’s biographer Halsey Stevens points out
that Bartók’s manuscript is filled with uncharacteristic markings like “with great sentiment,”
that don’t appear in the published score.) At the
beginning of the second movement, the orchestra
underlines a short violin cadenza with the plangent harmony of Wagner’s Tristan chord, music’s
most celebrated symbol of unfulfilled passion.
(Tristan returns again later in the movement.)
The concerto is the last of Bartók’s late-romantic
scores—stamped with the originality of one of
this century’s pioneers, but written in the language of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss, whom
Bartók greatly admired.
One of the concerto’s puzzles remains
unsolved. Near the end, a little songlike melody
appears in quotation marks, dated “Jászberény,
horns, three trumpets, two trombones
and tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum,
two harps, strings
August 3, 1961, Ravinia Festival.
Isaac Stern as soloist, Izler
Solomon conducting
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
21 minutes
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
June 3, 4, 5, and 8, 2004, Orchestra
Hall. Samuel Magad as soloist, Daniel
Barenboim conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
February 11, 1952, Orchestra Hall.
Arthur Grumiaux as soloist, Rafael
Kubelík conducting
CSO RECORDING
1983. Kyung-Wha Chung as soloist,
Sir Georg Solti conducting. London
Bartók collecting folk songs and making field recordings
in Darázs, Transylvania (now Drážovce, Slovakia), 1908
1907 June 28.” What the tune is, or what happened in Jászberény (Bartók’s home) only three
days before he began to sketch his first violin
concerto, we will probably never know.
Shortly after Stefi Geyer rejected him, Bartók
became involved with Márta Ziegler, the first
of his piano students to become his wife. (He
married Ziegler in 1909 and divorced her in
1923, when he fell in love with his pupil Ditta
Pásztory, whom he married that summer.) In
1920 Stefi Geyer moved to Switzerland, where
she married Walter Schulthess, a composer
and conductor. During the 1930s, when Bartók
went to Basel to hear his music performed (he
wrote the Music for Strings, Percussion, and
Celesta as well as the Divertimento for the Basel
Chamber Orchestra), he and Geyer met several
times and became friends again. But it was
only after Geyer’s death in 1956 that their lost
concerto came to light, suddenly conferring on
Bartók’s other violin concerto the number two,
and giving at last this fifty-year-old concerto the
number and place in the repertory that Bartók
had denied it. Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna; Austria
Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral)
Even by nineteenthcentury standards, the
historic concert on
December 22, 1808, was
something of an endurance test. That night,
Beethoven conducted the
premieres of both his
Fifth and Sixth symphonies; played his Fourth
Piano Concerto (conducting from the keyboard);
and rounded out the program with the Gloria
and the Sanctus from the Mass in C, the concert
aria Ah! perfido, improvisations at the keyboard,
and the Choral Fantasy (written in great haste at
the last moment as a grand finale).
If concertgoers that evening read their printed
program—the luxury of program notes still many
decades in the future—they would have found
the following brief guide to the Sixth Symphony,
in Beethoven’s own words:
Pastoral Symphony, more an expression of
feeling than painting. 1st piece: pleasant
feelings which awaken in men on arriving
in the countryside. 2d piece: scene by the
brook. 3d piece: merry gathering of country
people, interrupted by 4th piece: thunder
and storm, into which breaks 5th piece:
salutary feelings combined with thanks to
the Deity.
Although Beethoven wasn’t by nature a man
of words (spelling and punctuation led a perilous
existence in his hands), he normally said what
he meant. We must then take him at his word,
believing that he had good reason (for the only
time in his career) to preface his music with a few
Above: Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Wilibrord Mähler, 1804–05
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well-chosen words and that curious disclaimer
“more an expression of feeling than painting.”
Perhaps Beethoven was anticipating the controversy to follow, for in 1808, symphonies
weren’t supposed to depict postcard scenes or
bad weather.
Beethoven’s idea itself was neither novel nor his
own. In 1784 (Beethoven was only fourteen), an
obscure composer named Justin Heinrich Knecht
advertised his newest symphonic creation: Le
portrait musical de la nature (A musical portrait of
nature) in five movements, including a depiction
of the peaceful countryside, the approach of a
storm, and a general thanksgiving to the creator
once the clouds had passed. It would take hearing no more than a measure or two of music to
explain why Knecht has remained obscure while
Beethoven turned the music world upside down.
The descriptive writing and pastoral subject matter of Beethoven’s symphony are a throwback to
the baroque era—think of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
or the Pastoral Symphony in Handel’s Messiah—
or at least to Haydn’s two oratorios, The Creation
and The Seasons, the latter written only half a
dozen years earlier.
History books are right, of course, to point
out the work’s novelties: the “extra” movement,
the descriptive titles, the programmatic element,
and pictorial details like the birdcalls in the slow
movement and the village band in the scherzo.
But Beethoven was also right in trusting that
“he who has ever had a notion of country life
can imagine without too many descriptive words
what the composer has intended.”
Our familiar picture of Beethoven, cross
and deaf, slumped in total absorption over his
sketches, doesn’t easily allow for Beethoven the
COMPOSED
1807–08
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 22, 1808; Vienna, Austria.
The composer conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, two
horns, two trumpets, two trombones,
timpani, strings
Beethoven composing the Pastoral Symphony by a
brook. Colored lithograph by Franz Hegi from the
Zurich Music Society Almanac of 1834. Hans Conrad
Bodmer Collection, Beethoven-Haus Bonn
nature lover. But he liked nothing more than
a walk in the woods, where he could wander
undisturbed, stopping from time to time to
scribble a new idea on the folded sheets of music
paper he always carried in his pocket. “No one,”
he wrote to Therese Malfatti two years after the
premiere of the Pastoral Symphony, “can love the
country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees,
and rocks produce the echo which man desires
to hear.”
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
40 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 2 and 3, 1894,
Auditorium Theatre. Theodore
Thomas conducting
July 16, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Willem
van Hoogstraten conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 25, 1998, Ravinia Festival. Edo de
Waart conducting
May 16, 18, and 21, 2013, Orchestra
Hall. Juanjo Mena conducting
CSO RECORDINGS
1961. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA
1974. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
1988. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
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T hey’re all here in his Sixth Symphony.
The most surprising thing about the
opening Allegro is how quiet it is:
seldom in five hundred measures of music (well
over ten minutes) does Beethoven raise his voice.
Surely no composer—including the so-called
minimalists—has so clearly understood the
impact of repeating a simple idea unaltered, or
slowing the rate of harmonic change to a standstill. When, near the beginning of the development section, Beethoven changes the harmony
only once in the course of fifty measures, the
effect of that shift from B-flat to D is breathtaking. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect
of this spacious, relaxed, blissfully untroubled
movement is that it comes from the same pen
that gave us—at the same time, no less—that
firecracker of a symphony, his Fifth, in C minor.
Not even the critic Donald Tovey, despite his
love for highbrow language, could find a better
word to describe Beethoven’s slow movement
than “lazy.” We can be sure that the laziness
is intentional, and it’s amazing how much this
least restful of composers seems to enjoy the
drowsy pace, the endless dawdling over details,
the self-indulgent repetitions of favorite sections,
and the unchecked meandering through the
byways of sonata form. Beethoven begins with a
gentle babbling brook (one of those undulating
accompaniment figures that Schubert would
later do to perfection) and ends with notorious
birdcalls. The only problem with the birds is
that Beethoven calls so much attention to them,
© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
bringing the music—and the brook—to a halt,
and then specifying first the nightingale (flute),
then the quail (oboe), and finally the cuckoo
(clarinet). But as many a writer has pointed out,
the birds are no more out of place here than a
cadenza in a concerto—the nightingale even
provides the final obligatory trill.
The third movement is dance music, with a
plain, homely, rustic peasant dance for a midsection trio. But the fun is cut short by dark clouds
and the prospect of rain. There’s probably no
more impressive storm in all music—the whole
orchestra surges and shakes, trombones appear
(for the first time) to emphasize the downpour, and the timpani shows up just to add the
thunder. This is, of course, no extra “movement”
at all, but merely a lengthy, rapid introduction to
the finale. The clouds finally roll away, the oboe
promises better things to come in a wonderfully
heartfelt phrase, and the flute, with its staccato
scale, raises the curtain on Elysium. And so,
to the yodeling of the clarinet and horn, we
willingly believe F major to be the most beautiful
key on earth. The moment is parallel to the great
triumphant sunburst that marks the arrival of
the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and,
although the means could hardly be less similar,
the effect is just as wondrous. Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.
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