PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, May 26, 2016, at 8:00 Friday, May 27, 2016, at 1:30Saturday, May 28, 2016, at 8:00Sunday, May 29, 2016, at 3:00Tuesday, May 31, 2016, at 7:30

Cristian Mcelaru ConductorAlisa Weilerstein CelloWomen of the Chicago Symphony Chorus

Duain Wolfe Director

IbertBacchanaleFirst CSO performances

DusapinOutscape

ALISA WEILERSTEIN

World premiereCommissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Mrs. Harold C. Smith Fund for New MusicCo-commission with Oper Stuttgart and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

INTERMISSION

HolstThe Planets, Op. 32Mars, the Bringer of WarVenus, the Bringer of PeaceMercury, the Winged MessengerJupiter, the Bringer of JollitySaturn, the Bringer of Old AgeUranus, the MagicianNeptune, the Mystic

WOMEN OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS

The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie.

Thursdays performance is generously sponsored by Terrence and Laura Truax.

The Friday matinee performance is generously sponsored by an anonymous donor.

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.

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Jacques Ibert Born August 15, 1890, Paris, France.Died February 5, 1962, Paris, France.

Bacchanale

Jacques Ibert is buried among the cypress and chestnut trees in Pariss Passy Cemetery, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. His grave isnt far from those of Gabriel Faur and Claude Debussy. Fate hasnt been particularly kind to Ibert,

especially outside his native France, and since he died in 1962, his music has nearly slipped from the repertoire. He is revered neither as a polished master such as Faur nor as a modern visionary like Debussy. The fact that he never belonged to any stylisticschool, such as the flippant, headline-grabbing Les six of his friends Honegger and Milhaud, has made it harder to categorize himand easier to lose sight of him on the congested roadmap of twentieth-century music. As a result, hes often thought of as a peripheral figure, and even his best work is sometimes unfairly dismissed as slight orsuperficial.

But Ibert is a true original, and he was a composer of substance from the start. He first attracted attention in 1922 with his three-move-ment orchestral piece inspired by The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wildes poem about the execution of a convicted murderer from a nearby cell during his own incarceration on morals chargesa work thats entirely at odds with Iberts reputation for light music. His only string

quartet, composed twenty years later, reflects the turmoil and trauma of World War II.

At first, Ibert hoped to be an actor, and even after he switched to the study of music, his pas-sion for drama gave his own works an unmistak-ably theatrical quality. At the Paris Conservatory, he studied with mile Pessard, who had taught Ravel, and then in Gdalges classes, where he met Honegger and Milhaud. During World War I, Ibert interrupted his studies to serve as a nurse and stretcher-bearer on the front lines. His big career break came in 1919, when he won the coveted Prix de Rome (on his first try, unlike Berlioz) for his cantata Le pote et la fe (The poet and the fairy).

If Ibert is difficult to pigeonhole as a com-poser, thats largely his own doing, for he wrote a wide range of music in many genres and for many purposesfrom background music for a Paris festival of water and light to cadenzas for Mozarts Clarinet Concerto. Under the influence of his lifelong love for the theater, he wrote seven operas and five ballets, as well as scores for radio dramas and incidental music for many plays, including his own take on A Midsummer Nights Dream. He turned his uproarious score for Labiches classic farce, An Italian Straw Hat, into a divertissement, one of his most often-played works. He was a natural to write music for film, which he did throughout his career. In 1948, he scored Orson Welless Macbeth, and four years later he provided the opening circus ballet sequence (based on the Pagliacci tale) for Gene

COMPOSED1956

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 2, 1956, broadcast on BBCs Third Programme

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestras first performances of Iberts Bacchanale.

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME10 minutes

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Pascal DusapinBorn May 29, 1955, Nancy, France.

Outscape, Concerto for Cello and Orchestra

COMPOSED201415

These are the world premiere performances

Commissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Mrs. Harold C. Smith Fund for New Music

Co-commission with Oper Stuttgart and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo cello, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, glockenspiel, bells, crotales, cymbals, medium and large lam-tams, castanets, bass drum, snare drum, bongos, gongs, temple blocks, woodblocks,pop bass drum, tambourine, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME28 minutes

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For Pascal Dusapin, Outscape, his new cello concerto being pre-miered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week, is the latest installment in his fascination with exploring the connec-tion between music and

nature. For Alisa Weilerstein, for whom it was written, it has come to be part of a cycle of bringing new life into the world this yearher daughter was born just last month, while Weilerstein was in the process of learning Dusapins new score, making the relationship between music and life especially meaningful. (She will introduce yet another cello concerto, written for her by Matthias Pintscher, later this year.) As the newest addition to a large list of pieces premiered by the Chicago Symphony over

its long life, Outscape is a reminder that the complex creative process of commissioning, writing, and preparing new works of music is, above all, a powerful and often deeply personal human experience.

Pascal Dusapin was first attracted to music at an early age, after hearing a jazz trio while on vacation with his family. He begged to learn the clarinet, but at his fathers insistence he studied piano instead, and eventually became infatuated with playing the organ. Hearing Edgard Varses Arcana, a grand, noisy, utterly individual master-work at the age of eighteen was a revelation; he knew then that he would devote the rest of his life to composing. His training and his career proceeded in unconventional yet, for him, utterly natural ways. In the 1970s, he abandoned studies with the grand man of French composition, Olivier Messiaen, after just one year in order to work with the iconoclastic Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, whom he viewed as the artistic

Kellys Invitation to the Dance, Hollywoods first all-dance film.

T he Bacchanale that he composed at the very end of his career was commissioned by the BBC for the tenth anniversary of its radio show, Third Programme, which was known for the cultural and intellectual heft of its programming. Iberts contribution is a brilliant scherzo for full orchestra. Like the famous

bacchanales in Samson and Delilah and in the Venusberg scene of Wagners Tannhauser, Iberts score is a fulsome riot of color and texture. From the opening measure, his rhythmic patterns are insistent and his pace relentless, although the mood relaxes temporarily in the middle portion. The Bacchanale is a far cry from the sober music the BBC was known for broadcasting at the time, but as a celebratory toast and a tribute to the seductive thrill of orchestral music, it isideal.

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descendent of Varse. Over the years, Dusapin has never been a member of anyschool or fashion, although he has absorbed elements from many. As he once said, he learned a great deal from Pierre Boulez, but also from the so-called minimalist Steve Reich.

Dusapins career-spanning stage works suggest the freedom of his imagination and the range of ideas that attract him. Beginning with Romeo and Juliet, a reimagining of the Shakespeare play composed in the mid-1980s, they include Medeamaterial, a companion piece to Purcells opera Dido and Aeneas; To Be Sung, a chamber opera with a libretto by the composer based on texts by Gertrude Stein and designed in tan-dem with a light installation by the pioneering American artist James Turrell; and Penthesilea, an adaptation of the classic 1808 verse play by Heinrich von Kleist about Achilless confronta-tion with the queen of the Amazons. (Dusapin also sees it as an allegory for modern timesIt is the insanity today in Syria, Ukraine, Kosovo, he told The New York Times a year ago.) O Mensch!, a hard-to-classify work from 2009it is essentially a song cycle with stage directionsis based on poems by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Many of Dusapins orchestral works have included prominent solo roles, even if they are not all concertos in the conventional sense. Watt, which was inspired by Becketts novel, features the trombone. Celo is the punning title of a cello concerto. Galim is scored for flute and orchestra. Aufgang (German for ascent), a violin concerto from 2011 that demonstrates the power of Dusapins language, present