PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant

Thursday, October 27, 2016, at 8:00Saturday, October 29, 2016, at 8:00Sunday, October 30, 2016, at 3:00

Andrés Orozco-Estrada ConductorBaiba Skride Violin

KodályDances of Galánta

SibeliusViolin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47Allegro moderatoAdagio di moltoAllegro, ma non tanto

BAIBA SKRIDE

INTERMISSION

IvesThe Unanswered Question

Mark Ridenour, trumpet

StraussAlso sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30

The appearance of Maestro Andrés Orozco-Estrada is made possible by the Juli Plant Grainger Fund for Artistic Excellence.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Classic Encounter series.

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

Zoltán KodályBorn December 16 1882; Kecskemét, HungaryDied March 6, 1967; Budapest, Hungary

Dances of Galánta

Galánta is a village near the road from Vienna to Budapest. (Originally part of Hungary, it now lies just over the border, in Slovakia.) When Zoltán Kodály was three years old, his father moved the family from a neighboring village to

Galánta. They stayed in Galánta for seven years, and it was there that Zoltán became acquainted with music. At home his father played violin and his mother, piano; at school he and his classmates sang the songs of the Hungarian countryside. A famous gypsy band provided the first ensemble sound he ever heard.

Years later, when Kodály, now a well-known composer, received a commission for a work to honor the eightieth anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic, he remembered his time in Galánta as the happiest years of his child- hood, and wrote these dances. Even after his family moved from Galánta to Nagyszombat (now Trnava, in Slovakia) in 1892, Kodály’s interest in Hungarian folk music continued to grow, particularly after he teamed up with Béla Bartók in 1905. Together they began to collect and preserve the hand-me-downs of a

dying musical tradition. (Nearly fifty years later, Kodály recalled their mission: “The vision of an educated Hungary, reborn from the people, rose before us. We decided to devote our lives to its realization.”)

In 1905, Kodály returned to Galánta for the first time in over a decade to track down the music of his childhood. He recorded over one hundred fifty songs, a few of which were sung by his former schoolmates. “Knapsack on back and stick in hand,” he later recalled,

I set out . . . to roam the countryside without any very definite plan. Sometimes I would just buttonhole people in the street, invite them to come and have a drink, and get them to sing for me; or sometimes I would listen to the women singing as they worked at the harvest; but the most exhausting part was the nightly sessions in the smoky atmosphere of the village pubs.

Kodály published his findings in his doctoral dissertation. “It is impossible to study folk songs satisfactorily,” he wrote, “particularly to investigate their rhythms, unless one hears them actually performed. Moreover, however exten-sive our knowledge and experience may be, it is only through hearing them sung by the peasants

COMPOSED1933

FIRST PERFORMANCEOctober 23, 1933; Budapest, Hungary

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, snare drum, triangle, glockenspiel, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME15 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 9, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest Ansermet conducting

December 24 & 26, 1953, Orchestra Hall. Fritz Reiner conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESAugust 27, 1998, Ravinia Festival. Asher Fisch conducting

September 20 & 21, 2002, Orchestra Hall. Daniel Barenboim conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1954. Fritz Reiner conducting. CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years)

1969. Seiji Ozawa conducting. Angel

1990. Neeme Järvi conducting. Chandos

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themselves that we can be certain as to their correct interpretation.”

L ike Bartók’s earlier dance suite, Kodály’s Dances of Galánta is a continuous work in a loose rondo form (the first dance

returns after the third and during the last of the five dances). Kodály re-creates the remembered sound of the Galánta gypsy band with the resources of the full symphony orchestra. The clarinet plays a leading role, as it often does in gypsy bands, and

there’s a great deal of fast, virtuosic violin music in the style of gypsy fiddling.

The music is based on the eighteenth-century verbunkos, a dance of military origin that mixed Gypsy, Turkish, and Viennese ingredients. Syncopation is prevalent, providing an irresistible rhythmic swing that differentiates this dance music from that of any other culture. Kodály had the style in his blood: what he hadn’t already absorbed he found in two volumes of dances from the Galánta region, published in 1804. Six years before the Dances of Galánta was composed, Béla Bartók wrote:

If I were to name the composer whose works are the most perfect embodiment of the Hungarian spirit, I would answer, Kodály. His work proves his faith in the Hungarian spirit. The obvious explanation is that all Kodály’s composing activity is rooted only in Hungarian soil, but the deep inner reason is his unshakable faith and trust in the con-structive power and future of his people.

Jean SibeliusBorn December 8, 1865; Tavastehus, FinlandDied September 20, 1957; Järvenpää, Finland

Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47

Unlike many composers who wrote famous violin concertos, Sibelius himself was a violinist. The violin was his first instrument, and his earliest composition was a little piece for violin and cello called Water Drops, which he wrote when he

was ten. After he began serious violin study at the age of fourteen, he was hooked: “the violin took me by storm, and for the next ten years it was my dearest wish, my overriding ambition, to become a great virtuoso.” When he moved to Vienna in 1890 to study composition, Sibelius played in the conservatory orchestra and ulti-mately couldn’t resist auditioning for the

philharmonic. He broke down and wept when he got back to his room, then went to the piano and began practicing scales. Even as late as 1915, long after he had put the violin aside and was a highly regarded composer, he wrote in his diary: “Dreamt I was twelve years old and a virtuoso.”

Sibelius was a natural to write violin concertos, but in the end he wrote only one, and he spent enormous time and energy on it before he was satisfied. No doubt it was, in some deep sense, his own concerto, even though he would never attempt to play it. Perhaps this explains not only the great pains he took in writing the piece, but also the way he treated the man who had asked him for it. Willy Burmester had known Sibelius briefly in Finland before his career as a violin vir-tuoso took off. It was Burmester who persuaded

Bartók and Kodály, ca. 1908, while teaching at the Academy of Music in Budapest

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COMPOSED1902–04

FIRST PERFORMANCEFebruary 8, 1904; Helsinki, Finland

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo violin, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME32 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJanuary 25 & 26, 1907, Orchestra Hall. Maud Powell as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting

July 28, 1960, Ravinia Festival. Jaime Laredo as soloist, Walter Susskind conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 9, 2008, Ravinia Festival. Joshua Bell as soloist, Leonard Slatkin conducting

April 21, 22 & 23, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Leonidas Kavakos as soloist, James Conlon conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1959. Jascha Heifetz as soloist, Walter Hendl conducting. RCA

1996. Maxim Vengerov as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec

1997. Maxim Vengerov as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting. Arthaus Musik (video)

Sibelius to write the concerto in the first place; the piece was tailor-made for him, and he assumed he would give the pre-miere. Sibelius began the score in 1902 and finished a completed draft in the autumn of 1903. He sent the work to Burmester, who responded: “Wonderful! Masterly! Only once before have I spoken in such terms to a composer, and that was when Tchaikovsky showed me his concerto.”

But when Burmester suggested that he needed time to master the work, Sibelius hired Viktor Nováček, a musician of no particular distinction who is remembered only for this one day in his life, to give the first performance. After the premiere, Burmester again offered to play the concerto, promising that “all my twenty-five years’ stage experience, my artistry and insight will be placed to serve this work.” But Sibelius, who had extensively reworked the concerto, picked Karl Haliř, a former member of the Joachim Quartet, to give the premiere of the revised version in October 1905, under the baton of Richard Strauss. And when the score was published, it was dedicated to Ferenc von Vecsey, a Hungarian violinist who was one of the concerto’s first champions.

T he work Burmester inspired but never played is a violinist’s dream. In fact, the first version was particularly criticized

for the way the solo part consistently overshad-owed the orchestra, and much of Sibelius’s sub-sequent reworking tried to restore that balance. Still, from the very first measures, it is the solo voice, rather than its dialogue with orchestra, that commands our attention. In September 1902, Sibelius had written to his wife about “a marvelous opening idea” for the concerto. What he ultimately put on paper is truly unforgettable, with the violin entering almost at once on a sustained mezzo-forte G quite at odds with the orchestra’s shimmering D minor. From there, the violin takes off on a long, rhapsodic theme; allows the orchestra one extended statement of its own; and then banishes it entirely from the central development section, which Sibelius, against all tradition, treats as a brilliant cadenza. This is but one masterstroke in a bold and inventive design.

Though less imaginatively conceived, the Adagio is deeply haunting: a broad melody begins low in the violin register and then takes off. (It is particularly lovely how Sibelius later accompanies that melody, now in the clarinet and bassoon, with pianissimo scales.) The British critic Donald Tovey called the spirited finale “a polonaise for polar bears.” The folksy main theme, over an excited drum beat, comes from a very early string quartet that Sibelius did not publish. The way the violin dances around the melody, however, teasing its insistent rhythms and recklessly walking the high wire, turns circus music into high art.

Willy Burmester, ca. 1902, who persuaded Sibelius to write the concerto but never performed it

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Charles IvesBorn October 20, 1874; Danbury, ConnecticutDied May 19, 1954; New York City

The Unanswered Question

COMPOSED1906, often revised until 1935

FIRST PERFORMANCEdate unknown

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo trumpet, four flutes, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME6 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESAugust 7 & 12, 1962, Ravinia Festival. Adolph Herseth and New York City Ballet as soloists, Robert Irving conducting

July 19, 1966, Orchestra Hall. Adolph Herseth as soloist, Morton Gould conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJune 29, 1985, Ravinia Festival. Adolph Herseth as soloist, James Levine conducting

October 13, 14, 15 & 18, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Christopher Martin as soloist, Susanna Mälkki conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1966. Adolph Herseth as soloist, Morton Gould conducting. RCA

1986. Adolph Herseth as soloist, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. CBS (original and revised versions)

Ives originally called this, his most famous piece, A Contemplation of a Serious Matter or The Unanswered Perennial Question. Its companion work, composed at the same time, is A Contemplation of Nothing Serious or Central Park

in the Dark in the Good Old Summer Time. Both are short works (with deceptively long titles) of extraordinary vision; each explores the radical—and at the time unprecedented—idea of combin-ing several independent layers of music, all at different tempos and intended for performance in different areas of the hall.

I n The Unanswered Question, as it came to be known, there are three spheres: a single trumpet, repeatedly asking the question

of existence; a quartet of winds, struggling to find answers; and a string chorale (still, hushed, ethereal, and remote) representing eternity. Seven times the trumpet raises its question (the pitches are always the same except for the last note). The answers are increasingly opinion- ated. Throughout—and indifferent to all—is the shimmering presence of the strings. The winds proceed at their own pace (if the strings are offstage, a separate conductor is helpful). When they don’t respond to the trumpet’s seventh and final question, the sound of eternity, marked ppp and then pppp decrescendo, suddenly seems deafening.

Richard StraussBorn June 11, 1864; Munich, GermanyDied September 8, 1949; Garmish, Germany

Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30

Without music, life would be an error,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. The German philosopher was an accomplished pianist and a competent composer (he wrote mainly choral works, songs, and piano pieces), and music was his

greatest passion. The central, defining event in his life was his acquaintance with Richard Wagner, which progressed from adulation (of the fanatical sort that Wagner particularly encouraged) to disillusionment, rejection, and finally radical estrangement.

Nietzsche’s influential prose poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra) wasn’t even a decade old when Strauss picked up a copy while

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COMPOSEDFebruary 4–August 24, 1896

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 27, 1896; Frankfurt, Germany. The composer conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and two piccolos, three oboes and english horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones and two tubas, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, bells, two harps, organ, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME35 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 5 & 6, 1897, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conduct-ing (U.S. premiere)

August 6, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Fritz Reiner conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESOctober 13, 14, 15 & 18, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Susanna Mälkki conducting

July 13, 2016, Ravinia Festival. Cristian Măcelaru conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1940. Frederick Stock conducting. Columbia

1947. Artur Rodzinski conducting. RCA

1954. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1962. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1975. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

1982. Sir Georg Solti conducting. Clarion (video)

1996. Pierre Boulez conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

on holiday in Egypt late in 1892. Strauss was then the hottest new name in the music world following the success of his tone poems Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration. He particularly identified with Nietzsche’s polemic against organized religion, and he was intrigued with the idea of the Übermensch (Superman), who over-comes the finiteness of life and rises above what Nietzsche called “Christian herd morality.”

But Strauss didn’t at first think of Zarathustra as a musical subject. He had gone to Egypt to escape Munich’s bitter winter (he had suffered from severe bronchitis the previous spring) and to finish his opera Guntram. The opera proved to be a commercial failure (personally, it was more rewarding—Strauss married its leading soprano, Pauline de Ahna, a few months after the premiere), but Strauss’s next tone poem, Till Eulenspiegel ’s Merry Pranks, was a triumph, and he continued to write orchestral music.

Early in the winter of 1896, Strauss decided to make Zarathustra the hero of a new tone poem. Nietzsche’s work has cast an unusually strong spell over composers—Mahler’s Third Symphony, Delius’s A Song of Life, and Lukas Foss’s Time Cycle are among the works it has inspired—and Nietzsche even said that it could be thought of as a musical composition itself. The prose poem, organized in four parts, contains eighty-two brief and highly varied reflections on the human condition—the titles range from “On the Flies in the Market Place” to “On Involuntary Bliss”—each one ending with the line, “Thus spoke Zarathustra.” Strauss picked

eight of Nietzsche’s topics that suggested music to him and arranged them, without regard for Nietzsche’s original sequence or overall intent, to allow for the development of certain purely musical ideas. We don’t know what Nietzsche thought of Strauss’s effort, but the tone poem was quickly acclaimed as one of the composer’s finest works, and it proved to be a score of considerable influence. (Bartók was inspired to devote his life to composition after hearing the Budapest premiere in 1902.)

When Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra was performed in Berlin shortly after the Frankfurt premiere, the composer commented:

I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant rather to convey in music an idea of the human race from its origins, through its various phases of development, both reli-gious and scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch. The whole symphonic poem is intended as my homage to the genius of Nietzsche, which found its greatest exempli-fication in Also sprach Zarathustra.

Strauss also slips a disclaimer into the score’s subtitle: tone poem for large orchestra, freely after Nietzsche.

Strauss conceived his work as one continu-ous movement (the eight chapter headings are printed in the score, but the divisions between sections aren’t always easy to hear). The music is governed by the use of two keys, C and B—their

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roots so close and yet their harmonies so far apart—to represent the unyielding force of nature on one hand and the ever-searching spirit of man on the other.

T aking his cue from Nietzsche, Strauss begins at sunrise, and there are few sunrises—in music or in nature—more

spectacular. (The familiarity of this passage from Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001, and from its unfortunate use in countless subsequent television commercials, has perhaps dimmed its luster for many listeners.) At the head of the score, Strauss printed the opening lines of Nietzsche’s prologue, in which Zarathustra descends from the mountains where he has lived for ten years and addresses the sun. Above the lowest Cs the orchestra can provide (in the contrabassoon, string basses, and organ over a timpani roll), Strauss writes a three-note motif of nearly irreducible simplicity (C-G-C, rising an octave) to signify nature. Once the sun rises, quickly and brilliantly (it’s every bit as noisy as the dawn in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung), Strauss begins his condensed traversal of Nietzsche’s work.

Strauss first takes on religion. In “Of the Backworldsmen,” the first of the eight chapters taken from Nietzsche, he sketches those who are naively imprisoned by their concern with the afterlife. The horns intone the first phrase of the chant “Credo in unum Deum” (I believe in one God)—Strauss even writes the words into the horn part—and the strings, subdivided into as many as twenty parts, begin a passage of luscious but self-indulgent beauty.

“On the Great Longing” depicts man’s desire to move beyond ignorance. The tonal worlds of B and C begin to collide and, at the peak of activity, Strauss moves directly into “On Joys and Passions,” in which the conflict between

spirituality and sensual abandon grows increas-ingly heated. In “The Grave Song,” Zarathustra laments man’s plight—his voice is taken by oboe and english horn solos—and in “On Science,” he turns to learning for illumination. (Nietzsche’s word, Wissenschaft, carries the broader meaning of scholarship and erudition.) Strauss writes a strict, methodical fugue on a theme that contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale—it begins

with the three-note nature motif in C major, followed by three notes of the B minor scale.

At the climax of the fugue, Strauss begins “The Convalescent,” detailing Zarathustra’s breakdown and healing—a large and vigorous passage that develops many earlier ideas and peaks with a flashback of the C major sunrise, followed by an entire measure of silence and then the darkness of B minor. Strauss couldn’t resist calling on his famous name-sakes, the other Strausses, in “The Dance Song,” where Zarathustra succumbs to a picture-postcard rendition of a Viennese waltz led by

a solo violin. (Composed thirteen years before his opera Der Rosenkavalier, this is the first of Richard’s many waltzes.) At the sumptuous climax of the dance, a bell begins to toll twelve times, progressively diminishing the music’s force to a mere whisper. This is “The Night-Wanderer’s Song,” based on the famous passage in Nietzsche beginning “O Mensch, gib Acht” (O man, take heed), where each line in the poem should be followed by the ringing of a bell. (This is the text Mahler sets in his Third Symphony.) The music gradually fades into silence, as the tonalities of C and B jockey for a final word, in a precarious and unsettling cliff-hanger conclusion.

Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.

Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch, 1906

© 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra