Program

Thursday, September 20, 2012, at 8:00Saturday, September 22, 2012, at 8:00Wednesday, September 26, 2012, at 8:00Friday, September 28, 2012, at 8:00

riccardo muti Conductor

Dvo ̌rákSymphony No. 5 in F Major, Op. 76Allegro ma non troppoAndante con moto—Scherzo: Allegro scherzandoFinale: Allegro molto

IntermIssIon

martucciNotturno, Op. 70, No. 1

respighiFeste romaneCircensesIl GiubileoL’OttobrataLa Befana

ONe HuNdred TWeNTy-SeCONd SeASON

Chicago symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music directorPierre Boulez Helen regenstein Conductor emeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

The concerts on September 22, 26 & 28 are generously sponsored by Cindy Sargent.

The concert on September 26 is generously supported by the Julius N. Frankel Foundation.

Comments By PHILLIP HuSCHer

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symphony no. 5 in F major, op. 76

antonín Dvo ̌rákBorn September 8, 1841, Mühlhausen, Bohemia

(now Nelahozeves, Czech Republic).Died May 1, 1904, Prague, Czechoslovakia.

To the late nineteenth century, Dvořák was the composer of five—not nine—symphonies. His first four, never published during his lifetime, were unknown, and so his last, From the New World, spent its first half century as no. 5. The F major symphony performed at these concerts is really Dvořák’s fifth, although it took some time to get this all straightened out. Like his nineteenth-century col- leagues Schubert and Bruckner, Dvořák has been good to musi- cologists, who sometimes make a living cleaning up after the fact. Only with the publication of Dvořák’s first four symphonies in the 1950s (the long-lost First Symphony was rediscovered after the composer’s death and performed for the first time in

1936) did we begin to use the cur- rent numbering.

This F major symphony is Dvořák’s most significant product of 1875, a result of the encourage-ment he felt after winning the Austrian competition—along with powerful endorsements and four hundred gulden—for the first time, and the most promising sign that the judges had picked extremely well. The prize launched one of the most prolific years of Dvořák’s career, and in addition to this symphony, composed in just six weeks during the summer, he also wrote his five-act grand opera Vanda in three months and turned out several substantial chamber pieces as well. But the symphony is the giant leap—a great advance over anything he had written

ComPoseD1875

FIrst PerFormanCeMarch 25, 1879, Prague

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeJanuary 24, 1919, Orchestra Hall. Adolf Weidig conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeMarch 29, 2003, Orchestra Hall. Pinchas Zukerman conducting

InstrumentatIontwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme39 minutes

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before. It’s easy now to see it as a score of extraordinary promise, because we know the brilliant Seventh Symphony, for example, or the timeless From the New World that followed, but the Fifth Symphony is itself a very impres-sive accomplishment.

We tend to think of Brahms and Dvořák as contemporary symphonists—their most famous symphonies were all premiered within the span of some fifteen years—who influenced each other in various ways. (When Dvořák began his Seventh, for example, he was still under the spell of Brahms’s new Third, which he had just heard.) But Dvořák composed this F major symphony a year before Brahms finished his first, and so this is his answer to the classics by Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann that he knew, not

a reaction to Brahms. (In fact, if either composer had an influence on the other at this point, it’s the other way around: Brahms got to know at least three of Dvořák’s symphonies while he was still writing his first one.) Dvořák’s F major

symphony sings with his own unmistakable voice; it’s free of the

heavy Wagnerian fog that clouds some of his early works and has a natural warmth and simplicity that often eluded Brahms. Still, Dvořák couldn’t escape the inevitable comparison to Brahms: when he dedicated this symphony to Hans von Bülow, the great conductor said he was thrilled to accept this honor from Dvořák, “next to Brahms, the most gifted composer of today.”

This symphony is the first important work of Dvořák’s maturity, and Simrock insisted (against Dvořák’s wishes) on pub-lishing it with a phony, high opus number to give it the stature of an even later composition. (Simrock picked op. 76, which puts it in the company of pieces composed a full decade later, even though Dvořák had appropriately written op. 24 at the top of his manuscript.) For a work saddled with such a convo-luted numbering history, the music itself is a marvel of natural, unfussy expression and clarity of form. The entire symphony reveals remarkable assurance and control, suggesting that the speed of its composi-tion was the result of certainty, not haste.

The opening Allegro ma non troppo is filled with genial, out-doorsy music—clarinet bird calls and hunting horns paint an inviting pastoral scene in high summer. The movement is vigorous and muscular until the very end, when Dvořák opts for quiet contentment over visceral excitement.

The melancholy Andante—an intermezzo in a moderate tempo rather than a self-important slow

Conductor Hans von Bülow, the dedicatee of Dvo ̌rák’s Fifth Symphony

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movement—suggests the dumka, the mournful peasant dance that Dvořák loved. The scherzo, which follows immediately after only a moment’s hesitation, takes its time shaking the spell of the Andante before it breaks into a jovial, rustic dance. (The way Dvořák blurs the distinction between the two inner movements is novel and highly effective.)

The finale shatters the sym-phony’s pastoral mood with its powerful opening in A minor—an unexpectedly foreign key in an

F major work. Dvořák shrewdly withholds F major for a very long time, which only adds to the sus-pense and drama. This entire move-ment, with its driving rhythms, big themes, and heated development, confirms Dvořák’s stature as a natural symphony composer. Both the brief, unannounced return of the opening material of the first movement, pianissimo, and the triumphant recovery of F major, celebrated with pealing trumpets, only add to its continuous sense of excitement and discovery.

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notturno, op. 70, no. 1

Although he grew up during the great age of Verdi—he was born two years after the premiere of La traviata—and died when Giacomo Puccini was at the peak of his success, Giuseppe Martucci is the rare Italian composer of his generation who never wrote an opera. After studying piano with his father, a trumpet player and bandmaster in the Neapolitan army, in 1867, Martucci publicly played a piece that he had composed for the first time. Soon afterwards, he began to work in Naples with Beniamino Cesi, who had studied with the great piano virtuoso and sometime Liszt rival (though that was largely a public relations con-coction) Sigismond Thalberg. At the same time, the young Martucci began to study composition seri-ously at the Naples conservatory. At his father’s insistence, Martucci did

not abandon his career as a piano virtuoso, and in 1874, he gave a concert in Rome that was highly praised by Liszt. Once he settled in Naples in 1881, where he was named conductor of the Orchestra Napoletana, Martucci established himself in that most elite circle of musicians—the triple threat of being an accomplished pianist, conductor, and composer.

Martucci wrote music for piano throughout his career. His earli-est works are mainly short piano pieces—of the first fifty opus numbers in his catalog, all but three are for solo piano—and they range from barcarolles and mazurkas to fugues and sonatas (there also is a piano duet arrangement of themes from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera). In 1886, Martucci gave the pre-miere of his B-flat minor piano concerto, a large and ambitious

giuseppe martucciBorn January 6, 1856, Capua, Italy.Died June 1, 1909, Naples, Italy.

ComPoseD1891, for piano; orchestrated 1901

FIrst PerFormanCedate unknown

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeMarch 24, 1919, Orchestra Hall. Giorgio Polacco conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeJanuary 23, 1959, Orchestra Hall. Fernando Previtali conducting

InstrumentatIontwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, harp, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme6 minutes

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score that solidified his reputation for infusing the Austrian-German tradition with an Italian sensibil-ity. (Riccardo Muti and the CSO played the concerto last season with Gerhard Oppitz as the pianist.) Although Martucci’s attention had shifted to the classic large forms by then—he began two symphonies in 1889—he occasionally returned to the piano miniatures on which he had cut his teeth as a composer. He

originally composed this nocturne in G-flat major for solo piano (it was the first in a set of two) in 1891, the year the Chicago Symphony played its first concerts, and then orches-trated it in 1901. Particularly in its orchestral version, it has become one of his most frequently per-formed works, and as an example of the Italian gift for natural sing-ing melody and for simple, direct expression, it is without peer.

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Feste romane

Ottorino Respighi came to this country for the first time in December 1925. He was already well known among music lovers for The Fountains of Rome, a brilliant tone poem composed in 1916, three years after he settled in Rome. “His Fountains of Rome has been played by practically every orchestra in the United States and Europe,” The New York Times said before he arrived, a remarkable feat for a piece of music not yet ten years old. Respighi and his wife Elsa, a soprano, began their American sojourn in New York City, where he played his new piano concerto with the philharmonic under Willem Mengelberg. The Pines of Rome, a sequel to The Fountains of Rome, was to be given its world premiere later that season by the philhar-monic, under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, who was already one

of Respighi’s greatest champions. Feste romane, the third panel in Respighi’s Roman triptych, and the work that closes this concert, was not yet written, but it would join its two companions three years later.

After New York, Respighi traveled to Chicago to appear with the Chicago Symphony, which had already welcomed a number of composers as guest conductors, including Richard Strauss; Sergei Prokofiev; and Respighi’s fellow countryman, Ferruccio Busoni. Respighi (like Martucci, whose Nottorno is performed at these concerts) was the rare artist who held the stage in three different roles—as composer, conductor, and pianist, “a dangerous test for any man to subject himself to,” the Chicago Post said the day after his January 29 debut. “But he is one of those who, with proper

ottorino respighiBorn July 9, 1879, Bologna, Italy.Died April 18, 1936, Rome, Italy.

ComPoseD1926–1928

FIrst PerFormanCeFebruary 21, 1928, New york City. Arturo Toscanini conducting

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeApril 4, 1930, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeJune 15, 1985, Orchestra Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas conducting

InstrumentatIonthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, e-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three offstage buccine

(ancient roman trumpets conventionally replaced by trumpets), three trombones and tuba, timpani, side drum, bass drum, tambourine, rattle, sleigh bells, cymbals, triangle, gong, glockenspiel, bells, xylophone, mandolin, piano, organ, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme24 minutes

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humility, has estimated his pow-ers accurately.”

Respighi had caused a stir in New York when he spoke bluntly with a Musical America reporter: “Atonality? Thank heaven, that’s done for! The future course of music? Who can say? I believe that every composer should first of all be individual.” Respighi went on to clarify that, for him, dissonance, like polytonality, had its place—“as a means to expression it has impor-tant uses.” For many in the Chicago audience, who had already heard some of Schoenberg’s thorniest music, including the US premiere of his Five Pieces for Orchestra in 1913, Respighi’s works came as a welcome sign of modernism in moderation. As the Chicago Post critic wrote,

He has mixed intimately with the advanced thinking of our day and the resources of the modern orchestra are at his fingertips, but he has kept his head. No pioneering excursions into the trackless wilderness for him. The Italian blood runs too strongly in his veins with the instinctive feeling for melody and the clarity of thought.

The novelty of Respighi’s language is largely lost on audi-ences today. Some of his most radical sound effects, such as a phonograph recording of a night-ingale’s song in The Pines of Rome, which were once hotly debated, can seem passé nearly a century later. The imagination of his orchestral writing, rivaled only by Ravel

among early twentieth-century composers (Respighi studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, the master of orchestration, in Saint Petersburg) is easily overlooked in the electronic age. His brilliant color palette and the powerful sweep of his writ-ing long ago became the lingua franca of film scores. (Even though Respighi’s work is no longer in fashion as concert music, his is still the style of choice for epic adventure movies—John Williams, arguably today’s most celebrated film composer, claims Respighi as one of his primary inspirations.) Respighi’s most widely performed works exemplify a lavish musical style that today’s culture ordinar-ily condescends to, but his biggest hits—and they were genuine popular successes, the best sellers of their time—are enduring land-marks, classics of their kind.

Respighi’s US tour was a tri-umph. In Chicago, audiences embraced his appearance (the powerful, classic cut of his profile was, as one critic noted, familiar to most Americans only from statues of long-departed Roman nobles), his stage presence (“there radiates from him a quality of straight-forwardness, a vigor of mind, and honesty of purpose that makes him what the Italians call simpatico”), his considerable pianistic skills, his intoxicating music, and his ability to coax powerful perfor-mances from the orchestra. Back in Europe at the end of 1926, he told a Berlin reporter that he found US orchestras “unbelievably excellent. I often noticed, while conducting in America, that when I struck a

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particularly difficult passage the men plunged into it with an almost fanatic zeal, as though to show me that they were equal to any demand made upon their virtuosity.” He made another trip to the U.S. early in 1929, returning to Chicago to play and conduct more of his music. By then, he had completed his Roman trilogy with Feste romane, which Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic premiered in Carnegie Hall in that February.

As the last of the Roman por-traits, Feste romane is the most spectacular of the three. It avoids the danger inherent in writing sequels by approaching its subject from a fresh point of view. After the landscape painting and scenic splendors of Fountains and Pines, Feste romane aims for something bigger and more dramatic—it is almost cinematic in its effect, with panoramic crowd scenes, action sequences, and sudden close-ups. At its Chicago premiere in 1930, the Herald Examiner critic called it “a gorgeous riot of tone, an encyclo-pedia of the colors and the sonori-ties of the orchestra, a splendid example of symphonic theater.” Feste romane is a formidable example of sophisticated orchestra-tion and spot-on tone painting. Respighi’s entire Roman triptych, with its evocation of the city’s layered history, cultural riches, and intense connection to life, has itself become one of Rome’s indispens-able monuments. As the Italian author Giorgio Bassani wrote in 1972, monuments are “reminders (this is the meaning of the word)

of what we still are, in spite of television and cars, and we very much need them in order to remain what we are, and not become sav-ages again.”

Feste romane marked the end of the line for Respighi; it is the last of his great orchestral showpieces. “With the present constitution of the orchestra,” he wrote after completing the work, “it is impos-sible to achieve more, and I do not think I shall write any more scores of this kind.” In his remaining eight years, he concentrated on small-scale works for reduced forces. His only orchestral compositions were transcriptions of music by earlier composers and arrangements of organ works by Bach. But, even though they represent merely one chapter in Respighi’s rich career, it is his spectacular Roman pictures that keep his name alive today.

Respighi’s brief description of his four movements, which follows, is all one needs in the way of a roadmap, for the music itself provides the details.

Circenses. A threatening sky hangs over the Circus Maximus, but it is the people’s holiday: “Ave Nero!” The iron doors are unlocked, the strains of a religious song and the howling of wild beasts mingle in the air. The crowd comes to its feet in frenzy. Unperturbed, the song of the martyrs gathers strength, conquers, and then is drowned out in the tumult.

Il Giubileo [The Jubilee]. Pilgrims trail along the long road,

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Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

praying. Finally, from the summit of Monte Mario, appears to ardent eyes and gasping souls the Holy City: “Rome! Rome!” A hymn of praise bursts forth; the churches ring out their reply.

L’Ottobrata [The October Festival]. The October festival in the Roman castelli covered with vines: echoes of the hunt, tinkling bells, songs of love. Then in the tender twilight arises a roman-tic serenade.

La Befana [The Epiphany]. The night before Epiphany in the Piazza

Navona: a characteristic rhythm of trumpets dominates the frantic clamor; above the swelling noise float, from time to time, rustic motifs, saltarello cadenzas, the strains of a barrel organ in a booth, and the call of a barker, the harsh song of the intoxicated, and the lively stornello with its expression of the popular sentiment—“Lassàtase passà, somo Romani!” [Let us pass, we are Romans!].

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