PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH 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, September 24, 2015, at 8:00
Friday, September 25, 2015, at 8:00
Saturday, September 26, 2015, at 8:00
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Xavier de Maistre Harp
Chabrier
España
Ginastera
Harp Concerto, Op. 25
Allegro giusto
Molto moderato
Liberamente capriccioso—Vivace
XAVIER DE MAISTRE
INTERMISSION
Charpentier
Impressions of Italy Serenade
At the Fountain
On Muleback
On the Summits
Napoli
Ravel
Boléro
This concert series is made possible by the Juli Grainger Endowment.
This work is part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective, which is generously sponsored by the
Sargent Family Foundation.
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
Emmanuel Chabrier
Born January 18, 1841, Ambert, France.
Died September 13, 1894, Paris, France.
España
España is the sole survivor
of a once-prestigious
career. The only work by
Emmanuel Chabrier that
is still performed with any
regularity, it began as a
simple souvenir of six
months in Spain.
Chabrier and his wife
spent the latter half of
1882 traveling the country, stopping in Toledo,
Seville, Granada, Malaga, Valencia, and
Barcelona. Chabrier’s score is one of the high
points in the late-nineteenth century’s fascination
with the Iberian peninsula that also inspired
Édouard Manet’s paintings of the 1860s, Lalo’s
Symphonie espagnole in 1873, and Bizet’s Carmen
the following year (joined in the next century by
Debussy’s Ibéria and Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole).
Chabrier’s close friendship with Manet—his
neighbor from 1879 to 1883—may have first
given him the idea to compose a Spanish piece.
Chabrier had once thought of being a painter
himself, and he closely followed the work of
the groundbreaking French artists during his
lifetime, regularly noting how closely their ideas
paralleled his own. Chabrier posed for Manet
on three occasions, the last time in 1881, only
months before the Chabriers set off for Spain.
When Manet died in 1883, Chabrier bought
COMPOSED
1883
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 4, 1883; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 25 & 26, 1895,
Auditorium Theatre. Theodore
Thomas conducting
July 9, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Hans
Lange conducting
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several of his canvases, including his last major
work, the celebrated Bar aux Folies-Bergère,
which he hung over his piano. (At the time of his
death in 1894, Chabrier owned a small museum’s
worth of significant art, including seven oils by
Manet, six by Monet, three by Renoir, and one
by Cézanne.)
Although Chabrier dabbled in composition
from childhood and became a pianist of impressive virtuosity, at first he followed the family tradition and pursued law as his profession. He continued to write music on the side while working
as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior
in Paris, but, in a sense, Chabrier only came into
his own as a composer after hearing Tristan and
Isolde in Munich in 1880. He resigned from the
ministry later that year, became a confirmed—if
not obsessive—Wagnerian, and decided to
devote the rest of his life to composition. It was
España, however, a very non-Wagnerian musical
postcard, that made him an overnight sensation.
W hile touring Spain, Chabrier filled
his notebooks with details about the
rhythms of Spanish dance music
(he concluded it was impossible to notate the
actual rhythm of a malagueña); the cut of the
dancers’ black felt hats; “the admirable Sevillan
derrière, turning in every direction while the
rest of the body stays immobile.” Near the end
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 13, 1991, Ravinia Festival.
Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting
February 23 & 24, 2012, Orchestra Hall.
Alain Altinoglu conducting
June 20, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Edwin
Outwater conducting (Donor
Appreciation concert)
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two
clarinets, four bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets and two cornets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle,
snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, two
harps, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
6 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1961. Andre Kostelanetz conducting.
Video Images (video)
of the Spanish tour,
Chabrier wrote
home to his friend,
the Wagnerian
conductor Charles
Lamoureux, that as
soon as he returned
to Paris he intended
to compose an
“extraordinary fantasia”—a reminiscence
of the music and
dance that he had
Charles Lamoureux
found so intoxicating
in Spain. It would,
he promised, incite the audience to a fever pitch
of excitement. Chabrier began the piece as a work
for piano duet—it was called Jota, after the lively
Spanish dance—but soon realized he would need
the full range of orchestral colors to do justice
to his vivid memories. España, as the piece was
finally called, is not only full of memorable
folklike tunes, but it also benefits from Chabrier’s
keen attention to the rhythmic patterns of
Spanish dance. As the composer predicted,
España was a great success from the start—it was
encored at the premiere and was praised by composers as different as Manuel de Falla (who knew
a thing or two about authenticity in Spanish
music) and Gustav Mahler (who conducted
España on several occasions). Even Chabrier,
however, cannot have imagined the popularity its
main theme would achieve seventy-three years
later as a Perry Como single on the Hit Parade. Alberto Ginastera
Born April 11, 1916, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Died June 25, 1983, Geneva, Switzerland.
Harp Concerto, Op. 25
In his native Argentina,
Alberto Ginastera was
recognized as a major
composer from the first
public performance of his
music. His ballet suite
Panambí was an overnight
sensation when it was
played at the Teatro
Colón in Buenos Aires in
1937; the complete ballet was successfully staged
three years later. (Ginastera eventually destroyed
all of his scores composed before Panambí, giving
the impression that he burst on the scene a fully
formed talent.)
In 1941, the U.S. government sent Aaron
Copland, a brand-name composer as American
as hot dogs and baseball, on a good-will,
fact-finding tour of Latin America. Before
Copland left—his itinerary planned by the
Committee for Inter-American Artistic and
Intellectual Relations (its title a marvel of
high-handed bureaucratic prose)—he agreed
to take careful notes so that he could give
a full report and recommend composers
for study in the States. His diary entry for
September 26 reads:
There is a young man here who is generally looked upon as the “white hope” of
Argentine music. He is now twenty-five
and is certainly the first candidate for a trip
to the States from any standpoint. Alberto
Ginastera would profit by contacts outside
Argentina. He is looked upon with favor
by all groups here, is presentable, modest
almost to the timid degree, and will, no
doubt, someday be an outstanding figure in
Argentine music.
But Ginastera was slow to make his entry into
the musical life of the United States. In 1941, the
success of Panambí persuaded Lincoln Kirstein
to commission a ballet from Ginastera for the
American Ballet Caravan, a company he was
then managing for George Balanchine. But by
the time Ginastera had completed Estancia, the
troupe had disbanded and the premiere was off.
(Estancia wasn’t staged for another ten years,
even in Argentina; the complete original score
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wasn’t played in the United States until 1991,
although by then a suite of dances from the ballet
had become popular concert fare.)
In 1942, Ginastera was awarded a
Guggenheim Foundation grant to visit the
United States, but the trip was postponed
because of the war. Finally, in 1945, the composer and his family came to this country as
temporary political refugees following Perón’s
assumption of power. This was the first of
many visits. For sixteen months beginning in
December 1945, he lived and composed in the
United States; he spent the summer of 1946
at Tanglewood, where he again met up with
Copland. Ginastera continued to roam, but
after Perón was removed from power in 1955,
he returned to Argentina, where he became an
indispensable part of the country’s cultural life.
U nlike nearly every other composer drawn
to the concerto form, Ginastera began
by writing one for the harp. (He went
on to write concertos for more familiar subjects:
piano, violin, and
cello.) The idea of a
harp concerto came
from Edna Phillips,
the first harp of
the Philadelphia
Orchestra, who,
along with her
husband Samuel R.
Rosenbaum, commissioned a work
from Ginastera in
1956. “I could hardly
dream that it was
Edna Phillips
going to be the most
difficult work I have
ever written,” the composer later confessed, “and
that it would take several years to see the light.”
COMPOSED
1956–1964
FIRST PERFORMANCE
February 18, 1965; Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania
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Ginastera began sketching the new concerto
in 1956, but by the time he had finished it in
1964, Phillips had retired. (Although she never
played Ginastera’s score—the 1965 premiere
was given by the big-name international soloist
Nicanor Zabaleta—Phillips claimed it was the
best of the many works for harp that she and
her husband had commissioned over the years.)
Ginastera wanted to write a concerto
that extolled virtuosity and challenged
the performer, but he quickly realized
that the harp presented difficulties for a
mid-twentieth-century composer:
The special features of harp technique—
so simple and at the same time so
complicated—the possibility of writing for
twelve sounds on only seven strings, the
eminently diatonic nature of the instrument,
and many other problems make writing
for the harp a harder task than writing for
piano, violin, or clarinet.
In the end, he spent eight years (and composed two other concertos, one for piano and
another for violin) before he was satisfied
that the harp part was not only virtuosic, but
playable—not only colorful and imaginative,
but idiomatic.
G inastera writes three movements. The
first charts an unexpected course: it
begins with fiery, percussive music, but
gradually becomes more conversational, leading to a soft, dreamy close. The harp interjects
itself into the dancing rhythms of the opening
and plays nearly nonstop. The harp writing is
brilliant and challenging throughout (although
it’s very different from the avant-garde pyrotechnics of Berio’s Sequenza II, the landmark
harp monologue composed at the same time).
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
October 16 & 17, 2003, Orchestra
Hall. Sarah Bullen as soloist, Daniel
Barenboim conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
solo harp, two flutes and piccolo, two
oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons,
two horns, two trumpets, timpani,
percussion, celesta, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
21 minutes
The movement recalls the “objective nationalism” of Ginastera’s earlier works, because of
its debt to Argentine folk song (it also relies
heavily on the contrast between 3/4 and 6/8
time that characterizes much Latin American
music). But at the same time, it’s steeped in
the international language of modernism.
The slow movement begins as a dialog between
low, somber strings and harp. Ginastera has
a remarkable ear for atmosphere and delicate
sonorities. The heart of the music is as mysterious
and elusive as one of Bartók’s famous pieces of
night music.
The solo harp launches the final movement
with a large, rhapsodic cadenza characterized
not just by display and special effects (glissandos
played with the fingernails, “whistling sounds”),
but by the greatest imaginable contrast, from
single bell-like tones to powerful chords and
great sweeps of sound. Once the orchestra enters,
the music settles into a wild, driving dance that
carries straight through to the very end. Gustave Charpentier
Born June 25, 1860, Dieuze, Moselle, France.
Died February 18, 1956, Paris, France.
Impressions of Italy
Performed as part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective
“Perhaps on the whole,
the most enchanting place
in Rome,” the
thirty-year-old Henry
James said after he visited
the Villa Medici in 1873.
High on the Pincian Hill,
overlooking a sea of
red-tiled roofs and domes,
the villa was built by
Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in the 1570s to
house his collection of classical statuary. Today it
sits amid the only remaining Roman Renaissance
garden with its original ground plan, and so one
can still follow the same garden paths as
Velasquez, who painted there in 1630, or one of
the winners of the Prix de Rome, including
Gustave Charpentier, who took up residence
there in 1887.
The celebrated Prix de Rome was a scholarship
established in 1663 that enabled young French
artists—initially painters and sculptors—to
study at the French Academy in Rome for three
to five years. The academy, which was closed
during the French Revolution, has been housed
in the Villa Medici ever since it reopened in
1803. That year, for the first time, the academy
began awarding prizes to composers, and it
continued to do so nearly every year until 1968,
when André Malraux, the French minister of
culture, discontinued the honor. The names of
most of the winners mean nothing to us today,
and Maurice Ravel is the most famous of those
who attempted—five times, in his case—and
failed to win the coveted award. Among the
few nineteenth-century Prix de Rome winners
whose music is still performed are Berlioz
(in 1830, the year his Symphonie fantastique
made him famous); Gounod; Bizet; Debussy;
and, in 1863, Massenet, who later became
Charpentier’s teacher.
Charpentier joined Massenet’s composition
class at the Paris Conservatory in 1884, the
year Massenet’s most enduring work, the opera
Manon, premiered at the Opéra-Comique.
Charpentier had been encouraged to pursue a
career in music by both his father and grandfather. He studied violin, first in Lille, and then,
beginning in 1879, at the conservatory in Paris,
where he eventually decided to become a composer. Didon, a cantata (or, as the score indicates,
lyric scene) he wrote under Massenet’s care, won
him the Prix de Rome in 1887. Although he
moved to Rome reluctantly—and, like Debussy
before him, returned home to Paris often during
his three-year residency, Charpentier’s Italian
sojourn turned out to be the most productive
period of his career. The core of his life’s work
was accomplished at the Villa Medici: these
Impressions of Italy that Theodore Thomas and
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the Chicago Symphony
would introduce to
America in 1893; a
“symphonie-drame,” La
vie du poète (a sui generis
score in the mode of
Lélio, the Berlioz work
that Riccardo Muti led
in Chicago in 2010); and
the libretto and the first
act of his most famous
work, the opera Louise.
Following the successful premiere of Louise at
the Opéra-Comique in
1900, Charpentier risked View of the Villa Medici and its garden in Rome, engraving by Giovanni
Battista Falda.
becoming known as a
one-work composer, like
Chabrier. The opera’s
tale of forbidden love and bohemian adventure,
mpressions of Italy has shared a similar
set to a score of sumptuous lyricism—the soprano
fate to Louise. The piece that introduced
aria “Depuis le jour” in particular—captured the
Charpentier to music lovers nearly a decade
imagination of an entire generation. Louise was
before Louise, and the score that is considered
performed one hundred times during its first seathe composer’s most successful instrumental
son and more than a thousand times by 1935. A
work, it enjoyed great success with audiences up
film version of the opera, produced with the com- to World War II. In 1909, music critic Georg P.
poser’s supervision and starring Grace Moore, was Upton included it in his book of Standard
released in 1938. Louise overshadowed everything Concert Repertory, which it was at that time.
else Charpentier wrote, including, most painfully, After giving the U.S. premiere in 1893, the
Chicago Symphony played Impressions of Italy
a sequel, Julien, which was an immediate flop
often during its first fifty seasons, but it has not
in 1913. In time, Louise, like many sweepingly
performed the score since 1937. In an era that
popular artworks from bygone eras, faded from
prized pictorial realism, evocations of atmopublic view. The last staging at the Metropolitan
Opera was in 1949. No major American company sphere, and depictions of local color, Impressions
of Italy was an audience favorite and a work of
has produced the work since the San Francisco
delightful, unassuming charms. Today, it is a
Opera’s revival in 1999, with Renée Fleming
souvenir of the age before globalization, when
singing the title role for the first time. “Depuis
travel was still a rare romantic adventure and
le jour” remains a popular soprano showcase, but
when each destination was distinctive and, in
those five minutes are all that today’s public ever
fact, unique. Impressions of Italy is an ode to
hears of Charpentier’s entire output.
I COMPOSED
1889–90
FIRST PERFORMANCE
October 31, 1891; Paris, France
(finale only)
March 31, 1892; Paris, France
(complete)
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FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
U.S. premiere
November 24 & 25, 1893,
Auditorium Theatre. Theodore
Thomas conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
November 3, 4 & December 14,
1937, Orchestra Hall. Frederick
Stock conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, three oboes
and english horn, three clarinets
and bass clarinet, soprano and
alto saxophones, four bassoons,
four horns, four trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
two harps, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
32 minutes
the spirit of place—and remembrance of the
once-grand tradition of musical travelogues.
L ike Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony,
Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio italien, Strauss’s
Aus Italien, and Elgar’s In the South
(Alassio), Charpentier’s score is the work of a
visitor intoxicated by Italy. Charpentier leaves
us with five “impressions,” each a picture of
indelible scenes from Italian life as viewed
by a fascinated bystander. The first is a serenade. It opens with an ardent unaccompanied
song in the cellos that, joined by strings and
harps evoking the sound of strumming guitars
and mandolins, grows more passionate until it
dies away in the night air. The second is a lovely
scene by a fountain. A solo oboe sets the mood,
tender and reflective. The next impression takes
us into the mountainside: the steady procession
on muleback is intercut with village tunes and
pastoral calm. The fourth picture is wonderfully
evocative of the great expanses viewed from
the mountaintops—with distant bells and bird
song—all encompassed by a grand, swelling
melody. Finally, in his most fully realized
portrait, Charpentier takes us to Naples, a
city that is still so simultaneously chaotic and
intoxicating that Elena Ferrante, the author
of today’s acclaimed Neapolitan novels, calls
it “the best and worst of Italy and the world.”
Clearly, Charpentier was both overwhelmed
and enraptured with what he found there.
“Naples is a city in which many worlds coexist,” Ferrante says, and Charpentier set out to
capture as much as he could of its richness and
complexity. This is music of abundance, full of
song and dance (the tarantella, in particular),
of both urban bustle and personal reflection,
and of the sorrow and sweetness of life.
C harpentier was so filled with Italian
impressions that he wrote a second suite
of orchestral sketches in 1894; the score
apparently was destroyed by fire and never performed. In 1911, Charpentier composed one final
purely orchestral work, a symphonic poem titled
Munich. (He lived another forty-five years.) It was
intended to be the first in a series of “souvenirs
de voyage,” continuing with Prague, Vienna, and
Monte Carlo, but Charpentier got no further than
Munich, apparently not finding in those destinations the same inspiration that struck him in Italy.
A postscript. Charpentier came to the
U.S. for the first time in December
of 1913, only weeks after Theodore
Thomas gave the American premiere of the
Impressions of Italy in Chicago. Charpentier
told The New York Times that, if he could
find a suitable theme, he hoped to write an
opera set in America. (He did not.) Shortly
after his arrival in New York, he introduced a
new ballet staging of the Impressions of Italy,
set on a Neapolitan terrace. In his scenario,
Daisy, a young American girl, is overcome
by the charms of Italian life and falls in love
with Pietro, a mandolin player. Juana, a
local girl, is already in love with Pietro, and
when he rejects her for Daisy, Juana stabs
Daisy in the middle of a grand Neapolitan
party. As the dancing continues, Daisy dies
while Pietro kisses her one last time. 7
Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France
Boléro
One of the most famous
pieces ever written, Boléro
began as an experiment in
orchestration, dynamics,
and pacing. Ravel was
quick to tire of his
exercise—he once said
that, although people
thought it his only
masterpiece, “Alas, it
contains no music.” But he didn’t object to
being famous.
Late in 1927, Ravel accepted a commission
from Ida Rubinstein and her ballet company
to orchestrate six piano pieces from Albéniz’s
Ibéria as a sequel to his brilliant scoring of
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. But when
Ravel returned from his whirlwind concert tour
of America and encountered problems with the
exclusive rights to Ibéria, he dropped the project
and instead chanced upon a tune with “a certain
insistent quality” that became Boléro. “I’m going
to try and repeat it a number of times without
any development, gradually increasing the
orchestra as best I can,” he remarked at the time,
and that’s precisely what he did.
Boléro was an immediate success as a ballet, but
its real heyday started after Rubinstein’s exclusive
rights ran out and the first concert performances
began. Ravel was embarrassed by its popularity:
COMPOSED
July–October 1928
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 22, 1928; Paris, France
(as a ballet)
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 21, 22 & 25, 1930, Orchestra
Hall. Frederick Stock conducting
July 24, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Eugene
Goossens conducting
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I am particularly anxious that there should
be no misunderstanding as to my Boléro. It is
an experiment in a very special and limited
direction, and it should not be suspected
of aiming at achieving anything different
from, or anything more than, it actually
does achieve. Before the first performance,
I issued a warning to the effect that what
I had written was a piece lasting seventeen
minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral
texture without music—of one long, very
gradual crescendo. There are no contrasts,
and there is practically no invention except
in the plan and the manner of the execution.
One can imagine Ravel’s dismay when he
realized that this was the music that would
carry his name around the world. Shortly before
he died in 1937, he summoned the strength to
travel to Morocco, where, among the sounds of
Moorish and Arabic street music, he was shocked
to hear a young man whistling Boléro. But, while
Boléro is by no means his most accomplished or
sophisticated work, it is, like every single piece
in the Ravel canon, impeccably detailed and
polished music. (In forty years, Ravel only wrote
about sixty works, nearly all of which belong in
the standard repertoire—an almost unparalleled
achievement.) The first tune, stated by the flute,
is as familiar as any melody in music, yet how
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
September 14, 15 & 16, 2007, Orchestra
Hall. Riccardo Muti conducting
August 7, 2013, Ravinia Festival. Carlos
Miguel Prieto conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and two piccolos, two
oboes, oboe d’amore and english
horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet
and bass clarinet, two bassoons
and contrabassoon, soprano and
tenor saxophones, four horns, three
trumpet and piccolo trumpet, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, two snare
drums, cymbals, tam-tam, celesta,
harp, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
17 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1966. Jean Martinon conducting. RCA
1976. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
1991. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Erato
many of us could accurately sing it from memory,
precisely following its unpredictable, sinuous
curves and recalling the ever-fresh sequence
of long and short notes. Certainly the second
tune, a free and supple melody introduced
by the high bassoon, has an elusive, almost
improvisatory quality.
Ravel proceeds with his exercise, stating the
first tune twice, then the second one twice, and
so on back and forth, each time adding new
instruments not just to effect a gradual crescendo,
but to create an astonishing range of orchestral
colors. Just before the end, Ravel’s patience suddenly wears out, and he makes a sudden swerve
from a steady diet of C major into E major,
upsetting the entire structure and toppling his
cards with the sweep of a hand. Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.
Composers in Chicago
Maurice Ravel’s only appearances with the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra were on January 20 and 21, 1928, at Orchestra Hall. He
conducted a program of his works, including Sheherazade (with
mezzo-soprano Lisa Roma), Daphnis and Chloe Suite no. 2, Le tombeau
de Couperin, La valse, and his orchestration of Debussy’s Sarabande and
Dance. According to the review in the Chicago Tribune, “the audience
cheered M. Ravel again and again, and at the end of the program the
Orchestra, incited thereto by the audience and by the music it had been
playing, gave him a prolonged and enthusiastic fanfare.”
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
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