Program

Thursday, February 27, 2014, at 8:00Friday, February 28, 2014, at 8:00Saturday, March 1, 2014, at 8:00

marcelo Lehninger Conductormatthew aucoin Conductor and Piano*J’nai Bridges Mezzo-soprano

StravinskySymphony in Three Movementsq = 160Andante—Interlude: L’istesso tempo—Con moto

StravinskyEight Instrumental Miniatures*AndantinoVivaceLentoAllegrettoModerato: Alla breveTempo di marciaLarghettoTempo di tangoFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

ravelChansons madécasses*NahandoveAoua!Il est doux

J’NAI BrIdgES

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

StravinskyConcertino*First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

Global Sponsor of the CSO

ONE HuNdrEd TwENTy-THIrd SEASON

Chicago Symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music director Pierre Boulez Helen regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce green Creative Consultant

(continued)

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marcelo Lehninger Conductormatthew aucoin Conductor and Piano*J’nai Bridges Mezzo-soprano

StravinskyPribaoutki*KorniloNatashkaPolkovnikStarets i zayats

J’NAI BrIdgES

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances

IntermISSIon

StravinskySuite No. 2 for Small OrchestraMarchwaltzPolkagalop

ravelUne barque sur l’océan

ravelAlborada del gracioso

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

“the tradItIonaL funCtIon of the orCheStra IS LargeLY a thIng of the past,” Pierre Boulez wrote as long ago as 1970. “The orchestra as we know it today,” he said, in words that ring just as true in 2014—“still carries the imprint of the nineteenth century, which was itself a legacy of court tradition.” Over the past five decades, Boulez has continually fought to bring the orchestra and its programs into our own time, and since he began his annual visits to Chicago in 1991, he not only has become our guide to the modern masters and new adventurers, but also a pioneer in the traditional world of programming. As in all the aspects of his extraordinary career—as composer, conductor, musical thinker—Boulez, now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus, demonstrates an uncanny foresight and clarity of vision; he has shaken up our familiar ways of listening and thinking about music; and time and time again he has rejected the idea of doing business as usual.

In the two programs Boulez has designed for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this season—this is the second of the two—he has created models of the kind of concert experience he has long advocated. Reacting to the rigid framework of conventional programming—which is further restricted by the conservative design of concert halls and the restraints of rehearsal schedules—Boulez believes that

we must find new ways of looking at our musical heritage. Even in the case of the most familiar works, “we have to bypass our memories and use our imagi-nations to discover new potentialities.”

Pierre Boulez conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 2010

Igor StravinskyMaurice Ravel

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T his week’s concert of music by Stravinsky and Ravel exemplifies

what Boulez once called “poly-morphous groupings,” which allow a single program to tackle many different repertoires—solo, chamber music, and orchestral, as well as both vocal and instrumental compositions. This program is anchored by important landmarks—a sym-phony (in spirit, if not in the classical sense of the word) by Stravinsky at the start and two of Ravel’s greatest orchestral works to close. And it is filled out with the kinds of minia-tures that are crucial to history, but rarely get performed on symphonic programs simply because of their size and their scoring. These compositions may be little and neglected, but they are not minor. Small works tell us things about a composer that the big pieces do not, just as, in order to truly know a great writer, we need to read the short stories or essays as well as the novels.

This week’s program is also a study in transformation: five of these eight works began life scored for piano or string quartet and were only later—forty-one years later, in the case of Stravinsky’s Eight Instrumental Miniatures—reworked for larger forces. These compositions reveal the essential unrest and curiosity at the heart of the artis-tic process: what begins as a fully formed and finished piece continues to haunt its composer with its untapped potential. The result, in all cases, is a work that expands upon the composer’s original vision.

Boulez has devised a particular itinerary that balances works of radically dif-ferent sizes, flows naturally from piece to piece, juxtaposes distinct sonorities,

Pierre Boulez’s original sketch of programs for Chicago

5

groups together compositions with similar histories—all three pieces on the entire second half of this concert, for example, were originally conceived for piano—and reveals often over-looked connections. The fascinating journey through these eight composi-tions that Boulez originally planned to lead here in Chicago he has now turned over to Marcelo Lehninger and Matthew Aucoin. But Boulez himself is still, in the truest sense of the word, our guide.

1904–1905 ravel composes Miroirs for piano, which includes Une barque sur l’océan and Alborada del gracioso as its third and fourth pieces

1906 ravel orchestrates Une barque sur l’océan

1914 Stravinsky composes Pribaoutki

1914–1917 Stravinsky composes Three Easy Pieces and Five Easy Pieces for piano duet, later regrouping and orchestrating them as the two Suites for Small Orchestra

1918 ravel orchestrates Alborada del gracioso

1920 Stravinsky composes the Concertino in its original version for string quartet

1921 Stravinsky composes The Five Fingers, eight short pieces for solo piano, which are later orchestrated as Eight Instrumental Miniatures

Stravinsky takes pieces from his Easy Pieces for piano and orchestrates them as Suite no. 2 for Small orchestra

1926 ravel composes Chansons madécasses

1942–1945 Stravinsky composes the Symphony in three movements

1952 Stravinsky arranges his Concertino for a chamber ensemble of twelve instruments

1962 Stravinsky orchestrates eight Instrumental miniatures for fifteen players

Pierre Boulez conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 2010

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Igor StravinskyBorn June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.Died April 6, 1971, New York City.

Symphony in three movements

ComPoSed1942–1945

fIrSt PerformanCeJanuary 24, 1946; New york City. The composer conducting

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSNovember 17 & 18, 1960, Orchestra Hall. Hans rosbaud conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeSJanuary 20 & 22, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Leonard Slatkin conducting

InStrumentatIontwo fl utes and piccolo, two oboes, three clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, piano, harp, strings

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme22 minutes

CSo reCordIngS1993. Sir georg Solti conducting. London

2009. Pierre Boulez conducting. CSO resound

No composer has given us more perspectives on a “symphony” than Stravinsky. He wrote a symphony at the very beginning of his career (it’s his op. 1), but Stravinsky quickly became famous as the composer of three ballet

scores (Petrushka, Th e Firebird, and Th e Rite of Spring), and he spent the next few years compos-ing for the theater and the opera house. When, in 1920, he fi nally returned to writing music for an orchestra on the concert stage, he composed the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which isn’t a symphony in the classical sense of the word. (Stravinsky intentionally uses the plural, alluding to the original meaning of the word, which implies instruments sounding together.)

With the Symphony of Psalms, his great choral work of 1930, Stravinsky was again playing word games. (And, perhaps, as has been suggested, he used the term partly to placate his publisher, who reminded him, after the score was fi n-ished, that he had been commissioned to write a symphony.) Th en, at last, a true symphony: in 1938, Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, together with Mrs. John Alden Carpenter and several of her friends in Chicago, asked Stravinsky to compose something to honor the fi ftieth anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1940–41 season. To celebrate a milestone in the life of a great American orchestra, Stravinsky

decided to tackle the “standard” by writing a symphony in C in the four orthodox movements, scored for a Beethoven orchestra. Two years later, Stravinsky began sketches for this Symphony in Th ree Movements—his fi nal essay on what a symphony can mean. (From time to time he regretted not having called it simply Th ree Symphonic Movements.) In the Symphony in C, Stravinsky had enjoyed masquerading as Haydn, but the new Symphony in Th ree Movements is much more a work of its own time.

In a program note written for the premiere in 1946, Stravinsky asserted that the symphony was absolute music, although touched “by this arduous time of sharp and shifting events, of despair and hope, of continual torments, of tension, and, at last, cessation and relief.” Two years later, he wrote a letter to the composer Ingolf Dahl insisting that “if passages from the program notes are used to imply extramusical connotations in my work, I have to disclaim any responsibility for such interpretations.” Th is was characteristic Stravinsky, and, even though the composer’s followers had heard words to this eff ect time and time again, they always suspected there was more to the story. Finally, in Dialogues and A Diary, published in 1963, Stravinsky wrote openly about the genesis of the symphony. Th ose comments follow.

Igor StravInSkY on the SYmPhonY In three movementS

Th e symphony was written under the impression of world events. I will not say that it expresses

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my feeling about them, but only that, without participation of what I think of as my will, they excited my musical imagination. And the impressions that activated me were not general, or ideological, but specific: each episode in the symphony is linked in my imagination with a specific cinematographic impression of war.

The third movement even contains the gen-esis of a war plot, though I accepted it as such only after the composition was completed. The beginning of the movement is partly and in some inexplicable way a musical reaction to the newsreels and documentaries I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The square march beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba—these are all related to those abhorrent pictures.

Though what I call my impressions of world events were derived almost entirely from films, the root of my indignation was a personal experience. One day, in Munich, in 1932, I saw a squad of Brown Shirts enter the street below the balcony of my room in the Bayerischer Hof and assault a group of civilians. The latter tried to defend themselves with street benches, but they were soon crushed beneath these clumsy shields. The police eventually arrived, of course, but the attackers had all dispersed. That same night I went with Vera de Bosset and the photog-rapher Eric Schall to a small Allée restaurant. As we dined, a gang in swastika armbands entered the room. One of them began to talk insultingly about Jews and to aim his remarks in our direction. With the afternoon street fight still in our eyes, we hurried to leave, but the now-shouting Nazi and his myrmidons followed, cursing and threatening us the while. Schall protested, and at that they began to kick and to hit him. Miss de Bosset ran to a corner, found a policeman, and told him a man was being killed, but this information did not arouse him to any action. We were rescued by a timely taxi and though Schall was battered and bloody, we went directly to a Police Court. The magistrate was as little perturbed with our story, however, as the

policeman had been. “In Germany today, such things happen every minute,” was all he said.

But to return to the plot of the movement, in spite of contrasting episodes such as the canon for bassoons, the march music predominates until the fugue which is the stasis and the turning point. The immobility at the beginning of this fugue is comic, I think—and so, to me, was the overturned arrogance of the Germans when their machine failed. The exposition of the fugue and the end of the symphony are associated in my plot with the rise of the Allies, and the final, rather too commercial, D-flat sixth chord—instead of the expected C—in some way tokens my extra exuberance in the Allied triumph. The figure

was developed from the rhumba in the timpani part in the introduction to the first movement. It is somehow, inexplicably, associated in my imagi-nation with the movements of war machines.

The first movement was likewise inspired by a war film, this time of scorched earth tactics in China. The middle part of the movement was conceived as a series of instrumental conversations to accompany a series of cinematographic scenes showing the Chinese people scratching and dig-ging in their fields. The music for clarinet, piano, and strings that mounts in intensity and volume until the explosion of the three chords . . . , and that then begins all over again, was all associated in my mind with this Chinese documentary.

The formal substance of the symphony— “Three Symphonic Movements” would be a more exact title—exploits the idea of counterplay between several types of contrasting elements. One such contrast, the most obvious, is that of harp and piano, the principal instrumental protagonists. Each has a large obbligato role and a whole movement to itself, and only at the turning-point fugue, the Nazi queue de poisson, are the two heard together and alone.

8

Igor Stravinsky

eight Instrumental miniatures

ComPoSed1921, as piano pieces

1962, orchestrated for small ensemble

fIrSt PerformanCeMarch 26, 1962; Los Angeles, California (pieces 1–4)

April 29, 1962; Toronto, Canada (complete). The composer conducting

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSThese are the fi rst CSO performances.

InStrumentatIontwo fl utes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, horn, two violins, two violas, two cellos

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme8 minutes

After fi nishing the monumental Rite of Spring in 1913, Stravinsky’s writing table was regularly covered with miniatures of all kinds—the Easy Pieces for piano duet that he later transformed into two suites for small orchestra (the second is performed

on this program); various short songs such as the Pribaoutki that close the fi rst half of this week’s concert; and various works for solo piano. Th ey not only gave Stravinsky a breather, after writing so much large-scale orchestral music—not just Th e Rite of Spring, but Petrushka and Th e Firebird that had immediately preceded it—but they allowed him to tinker with potent new ideas that fascinated him, and to fi nd his way towards the next chapter in his many-chaptered career.

T hese Eight Instrumental Miniatures began life as little piano pieces for children to play—Th e Five Fingers,

or “eight very easy tunes on fi ves notes,” as Stravinsky put it. He took pains to make sure that “the fi ve fi ngers of the right hand, once on the keys, remain in the same position sometimes

even for the whole length of the piece, while the left hand, which is accompanying the melody, executes a harmonic or contrapuntal pattern of the utmost simplicity.” As always in Stravinsky’s output, simplicity does not preclude ingenuity, and each of these tiny pieces is a jewel of style, imagination, and abundant variation on fi ve-note ideas. Written in the shadow of Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s reimagining of eighteenth-century music, each of the pieces carries a traditional Italian tempo marking and several of them echo certain features of the classical era.

Four decades later, in 1961, Stravinsky orches-trated the last of these pieces, a tango marked pesante (heavy), for a small chamber ensemble, which was performed that December in Mexico City. But the following year he withdrew the score and decided to rewrite all eight of the Five Fingers for a group of fi fteen players. Stravinsky not only reordered the eight pieces, but he recomposed stretches of the music as well—“rhythmic rewriting, phrase regrouping, canonic elaboration, new modulation,” as he summarized it. Th e children’s games of his early days had become the fascination of an old man at the end of his career. After these Eight Instrumental Miniatures, Stravinsky composed just a handful of scores.

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maurice ravelBorn March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.

Chansons madécasses

ComPoSed1925–26

fIrSt PerformanCeMay 8, 1926; rome, Italy

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSThese are the fi rst CSO performances.

InStrumentatIonvoice, fl ute, cello, piano

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme14 minutes

With Debussy’s death in 1918, Ravel was widely recognized as the leading French composer. But Ravel shunned the limelight, and from 1921 on, he lived primarily in the house he purchased outside Paris. Th e main work of the next years,

the one-act opera L’enfant et les sortilèges, also marked a kind of retreat, for it allowed Ravel to inhabit a world seen through a child’s eyes. In 1925, the year he completed the opera, Ravel received a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the Washington, D.C. arts patron (and Chicago native) who annually funded a new chamber work from an important composer. Th at year, marked by fi ftieth-birthday tributes and the success of his new opera, Ravel began the Chansons madécasses. Mrs. Coolidge had asked Ravel for a song cycle, accompanied “if possible” by fl ute, cello, and piano. For his texts, Ravel picked the Madagascan Songs of Évariste-Désiré de Forges, viscount de Parny, an eighteenth-century Creole poet. (At the time, de Parny claimed he had collected and translated several indigenous songs, but he never set foot in Madagascar, and, in fact, his poems were written in India.) It was a surprising choice, particularly since, as Ravel recognized, these poems intro-duced “something new, dramatic—indeed erotic” into his music.

T he Chansons madécasses are among Ravel’s most alluring and exotic works—a throwback, in subject matter, to the

world of his early Shéhérazade. By the 1920s, Ravel’s music style was purifi ed of all excess,

and so he was able to create brilliant, volup-tuous colors and a seductive atmosphere with just four performers. “It is a sort of quartet,” the composer said, “where the voice is the principal instrument. Simplicity dominates.”

Th e music is simplicity itself, in the sense that it is remarkably spare and economical, partic-ularly for a composer who had written some of the richest and most sumptuously colored music of the early twentieth century, but it is hardly chaste. In fact, these songs fi nd Ravel stretch-ing for a greater expressive quality, both from instruments and voice. Th ey even suggest the powerful infl uence of Arnold Schoenberg, whose imprint is rarely detected in Ravel’s music—“I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian,” Ravel wrote, “but I do not know whether I would have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.” Th e quiet exoticism of the fi rst song and the languid glow of the third are exceptional. But it is the fi erce passion of the middle song that caused the greatest stir at the time, partly because of the savage chanting of the vocal line, and partly because of its anticolonial sentiments (“Beware of the white men, dwellers of the shore” is a recurring line). When this song was pre-miered separately in the fall of 1925, before the cycle was completed, attempts to encore the piece were interrupted by shouting from the audience. Although de Parny’s text dates back to 1787, its message for modern times was unmistakable.

At the Paris premiere of the complete cycle, it was immediately acclaimed as one of Ravel’s greatest works and as a new landmark in his evolving style. “He condenses his thought in forms of increasingly rigorous simplicity,” one critic wrote. Late in his life, Ravel said the Chansons madécasses were the favorites of all his songs.

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ChanSonS madéCaSSeS

nahandoveNahandove, ô belle Nahandove!L’oiseau nocturne a commencé ses cris,la pleine lune brille sur ma tête,et la rosée naissante humecte mes cheveux.Voici l’heure: qui peut t’arrêter,Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Le lit de feuilles est préparé;je l’ai parsemé de fleurs et d’herbes odoriférantes;

il est digne de tes charmes,Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Elle vient. J’ai reconnu la respirationprécipitée que donne une marche rapide;j’entends le froissement de la pagne qui

l’enveloppe;c’est elle, c’est Nahandove, la belle Nahandove!

Reprends haleine, ma jeune amie;repose-toi sur mes genoux.Que ton regard est enchanteur!Que le mouvement de ton sein est vif et délicieux

sous la main qui le presse!Tu souris, Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Tes baisers pénètrent jusqu’à l’âme;tes caresses brûlent tous mes sens;arrête, ou je vais mourir.Meurt-on de volupté,Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove?

Le plaisir passe comme un éclair.Ta douce haleine s’affaiblit,tes yeux humides se referment,ta tête se penche mollement,et tes transports s’éteignent dans la langueur.Jamais tu ne fus si belle,Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Tu pars, et je vais languirdans les regrets et les désirs.Je languirai jusqu’au soir.Tu reviendras ce soir,Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

nahandoveNahandove, O lovely Nahandove!The bird of night has begun its calls,the full moon shines on my head,and the new-born dew moistens my hair.Now is the hour, who can stop you,Nahandove, O lovely Nahandove!

The bed of leaves is prepared;I have strewn it with flowers and sweet-

smelling herbs;it is worthy of your charms,O lovely Nahandove!

She comes. I recognized the hasty breaththat comes from quick walking;I hear the rustle of the loin-cloth that wraps

her round;it is she, it is Nahandove, O lovely Nahandove!

Take breath, my little dear,rest on my lap.How bewitching is your glance!How quick and delightful is the motion of

your breastunder the pressure of a hand!You smile, Nahandove, O lovely Nahandove!

Your kisses fly to the soul;your caresses burn my every sense;stop, or I shall die.Does one die of pleasure,Nahandove, O lovely Nahandove?

Delight fades like a flash of lightning.Your sweet breath falters,your damp eyes close,your head falls softly forward,and your ecstasies melt into languor.You were never so beautiful,Nahandove, O lovely Nahandove.

You leave and I shall pine in yearning and desire.I shall pine until evening.You will return tonight,Nahandove, O lovely Nahandove!

11 (Please turn the page quietly.)

aoua!Méfiez-vous des blancs,habitants du rivage.Du temps de nos pères,des blancs descendirent dans cette île.On leur dit: Voilà des terres,que vos femmes les cultivent.Soyez justes, soyez bons,et devenez nos frères.

Les blancs promirent, et cependantils faisaient des retranchements.Un fort menaçant s’éleva;le tonnerre fut renfermédans des bouches d’airain;leurs prêtres voulurent nous donnerun Dieu que nous ne connaissons pas;ils parlèrent enfind’obéissance et d’esclavage.

Plutôt la mort!Le carnage fut long et terrible;mais, malgré la foudre qu’ils vomissaient,et qui écrasait des armées entières,ils furent tous exterminés.Aoua! Méfiez-vous des blancs!

Nous avons vu de nouveaux tyrans,plus forts et plus nombreaux,planter leur pavillon sur le rivage.Le ciel a combattu pour nous;il a fait tomber sur eux les pluies,les tempêtes et les vents empoisonnés.Ils ne sont plus, et nous vivons libres.Aoua! Méfiez-vous des blancs,habitants du rivage.

aoua!Beware of white men,dwellers of the shore.In the time of our fathers,white men landed on this island.They were told: Here are lands,may your women till them.Be just, be worthy,and become our brothers.

The white men promised, and yetthey built entrenchments.A threatening stronghold arose;thunder was shut upin mouths of brass;their priests wanted to give usa god we did not know;they spoke in the endof obedience and slavery.

Death rather than that.The bloodshed was long and terrible;but despite the thunder they spewed outwhich destroyed whole armies,they were all exterminated.Aoua! Beware of white men.

I have seen new tyrants,stronger and more numerous,planting their tent on the shore.Heaven has fought on our behalf.It has sent rain to fall on them,tempests and poisoned winds.They are no more, and we live in freedom.Aoua! Beware of white men,dwellers of the shore.

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IL eSt douxIl est doux de se coucher, durant la chaleur, sous un arbre touffu, et d’attendre que le vent du soir amène la fraîcheur.

Femmes, approchez. Tandis que je me repose ici sous un arbre touffu, occupez mon oreille par vos accents prolongés. Répétez la chanson de la jeune fille, lorsque ses doigts tressent la natte ou lorsqu’assise auprès du riz, elle chasse les oiseaux avides.

Le chant plaît à mon âme. La danse est pour moi presque aussi douce qu’un baiser. Que vos pas soient lents; qu’ils imitent les attitudes du plaisir et l’abandon de la volupté.

Le vent du soir se lève; la lune commence à briller au travers des arbres de la montagne. Allez, et préparez le repas.

It IS SweetIt is sweet to sleep, during the heat, beneath a leafy tree, and to wait for the wind of evening to bring coolness.

Women, draw near. While I rest here under a leafy tree, fill my ear with your drawling accents. Repeat the song of the young girl who, when her fingers braid her plaits or when she sits beside the rice, chases off the greedy birds.

The song delights my soul. The dance is for me almost as sweet as a kiss. Let your steps be slow; let them mimic the attitudes of enjoyment and the abandon of pleasure.

The wind of evening rises; the moon begins to shine through the mountain trees. Go and prepare the repast.

Symphony Center reminders

The use of still or video cameras and recording devices is prohibited in Orchestra Hall.

Latecomers will be seated during designated program pauses. PLEASE NOTE: Some programs do not allow for latecomers to be seated in the hall.

Please use perfume, cologne, and all other scented products sparingly, as many patrons are sensitive to fragrance.

Please turn off or silence all personal electronic devices (pagers, watches, telephones, digital assistants).

Please note that Symphony Center is a smoke-free environment.

Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

NOTE: Fire exits are located on all levels and are for emergency use only. The lighted Exit sign nearest your seat is the shortest route outdoors. Please walk—do not run—to your exit and do not use elevators for emergency exit.Volunteer ushers provided by The Saints—Volunteers for the Performing Arts (www.saintschicago.org)

13

Igor Stravinsky

Concertino

ComPoSed1920, for string quartet

1952, orchestrated for small ensemble

fIrSt PerformanCeNovember 11, 1952; Los Angeles, California

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSThese are the fi rst CSO performances.

InStrumentatIonfl ute, oboe and english horn, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, two trombones, violin, cello

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme6 minutes

Stravinsky’s fi rst eff ort writing for that great classical medium, the string quartet, was a set of Th ree Pieces composed in 1914. Th e Flonzaley Quartet, a highly regarded New York–based string quartet, played the Th ree Pieces from

manuscript at a concert in New York City, and the American poet Amy Lowell, who heard the performance, even wrote a poem attempting to reproduce the essence of Stravinsky’s music in words. But the score was oddly unidiomatic and it was harshly criticized; later, Stravinsky transformed it into a much more successful orchestral work. Nevertheless, the members of the Flonzaley Quartet decided to ask Stravinsky to write a short new work for them to play on tour. Stravinsky recalled that the group “wished to introduce a contemporary work in their almost exclusively classical repertoire . . . .” He gave them a score that is both contemporary, in its tonal language and rhythmic patterning, and classical, in its use of sonata form, the favored design of eighteenth-century music, and promi-nent virtuoso concertante part for the fi rst violin.

S travinsky began the score during the summer of 1920 in Brittany, where he grew bored with the picturesque village

of Carantec, hated the crowds, and quickly tired of tourists singing outside his window in the middle of the night. “I’m sleeping badly and composing music,” he said at the time. Th e Concertino was completed late in September and premiered by the Flonzaley Quartet that November in New York. But, according to the composer Alfredo Casella, the performance

“showed an almost complete lack of artistic understanding and resulted in a clamorous failure.” Like the Th ree Pieces, the Concertino was destined to a life on the shelf, while so many of Stravinsky’s other works at the time were being performed with increasing fre-quency and often attracted public attention.

Th ree decades later, at a time when Stravinsky was looking back over some of his older scores, he decided to revive the Concertino in an arrangement for twelve instruments. “My present intentions toward my earlier work have led me to re-bar it rather extensively,” he wrote at the time, of the need to reposition some of the measure lines to make it easier to read, “to clarify some of the harmony, and to punctuate

and phrase it more clearly.” Despite these modern improvements, Stravinsky didn’t touch the violin cadenza. In the new version, both the violin and cello have prominent solo roles, as a kind of baroque concertante group.

Members of the Flonzaley Quartet on a walking tour in Lausanne, Switzerland

14

Igor Stravinsky

Pribaoutki

ComPoSed1914

fIrSt PerformanCeMay 1919; Paris, France

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeJuly 23, 1967, ravinia Festival. Cathy Berberian as soloist, Luciano Berio conducting

These are the fi rst CSO subscription concert performances.

InStrumentatIonvoice, fl ute, oboe and english horn, clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, bass

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme6 minutes

By 1914, Stravinsky was the most talked about composer alive—the premiere of Th e Rite of Spring the previous May had sealed his fame—but he was a man without a home. Holed up tempo-rarily in a mountain chalet in Switzerland, he found

that he turned again and again to the pages of the collections of Russian poetry and popular stories he brought out of his homeland that summer. In particular, he loved simply to savor the words and syllables, “which produce an eff ect on one’s sensibility very closely akin to that of music.”

Pribaoutki, a set of “song games” for voice and eight players, fi nds Stravinsky indulging his nostalgia for Russian song and language—the act of composition inspired by homesickness, but also by the need to keep writing as a way of moving forward artistically. “Th e word pribaoutki denotes a form of popular Russian verse,” Stravinsky explains, “to which the nearest English parallel is the limerick. . . . According to popular tradition, they derive from a type of game in which someone says a word, which someone else then adds to, and which third and fourth persons develop, and so on, with utmost speed.”

Th ese songs, brief settings of Russian jingles, are tiny and nonsensical, but they are not trivial. Stravinsky had learned at the hand of a master, his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, how to synthesize folk art and high art. Stravinsky manages to

evoke the gestures of Russian song while, at the same time, producing a work that is entirely his own. Despite its nostalgic origins, this is the statement of a fi erce modernist—a work that looks forward and backward at the same time. In an article on the infl uence of folk music on modern arts music, Béla Bartók summed up Pribaoutki ’s Janus face:

Here the vocal parts consist of motifs that are . . . without exception imitations of motifs from Russian folk music. . . . Th e shortness of the motifs, which are all quite tonal when considered separately, makes possible an instrumental accompaniment consisting of a number of superimposed sound-surfaces which closely match the character of the motifs and are more or less atonal. Th e overall eff ect, indeed, is much close to atonality than to tonality.

All of the melodies in Pribaoutki are, in fact, original, even though they sound authentically popular; this is a kind of ersatz folk music—a brilliant fake. (Th e next phase of Stravinsky’s career, as a neoclassicist, proved him an expert forger.) Th ese are not folksong settings, but more importantly, works that recapture the spirit that invites people to make up songs in the fi rst place. “If any of these pieces sounds like aboriginal folk music,” Stravinsky wrote, “it may be because my powers of fabrication were able to tap some unconscious ‘folk’ memory.” Pribaoutki represents a remembrance of past things, told in the voice of the modern age.

15

PrIBaoutkI

kornILoNutko, dyadyushka Kornilo,Zapryagaj-ko ty kobylu,U Makar’ya na peskuPrirazmych’ gore tosku:Stoit brazhka v tuyasku,Brazhka p’yanaya p’yana,Vesela khmel’naya golova!Brazhku pornyaj vypivaj!

nataShkaNatashka, Natashka!Sladyonka kulazhka,Sladka medovayaV pechi ne byvala,Zharu ne vidala.Zaigrali utki v dudki.Zhiravli poshli plyasat’,Dolgi nogi vystavlyat’,Dolgi shei protyagat’

PoLkovnIkPoshol polkovnik pogulyat’,Pojmal ptichku perepyolochku;Ptichka perepyolochka pit’ pokhotela,Podnyalas’ poletela,Pala propala, pod lyod popala,Popa pojmala, popa popovicha,Petra Petrovicha.

StaretS I zaYatSStoit grad pust,A vo grade kust;V kuste sidit staretsDa varit izvarets;Pribezhal kosoj zayatsI prosit izvarets:I prikazal staretsBeznogomu bezhat’,A bezrukomy khvatat’,A golomu v pazukhu klast’.

kornILoGo on then, Uncle Kornilo,Saddle up your mare,At Makarij’s place on the sand,Dispel your grief and sorrow:The birch-bark jug is full of beer,The home-made beer is good and strong,It’s jolly to be tipsy!Drink the beer faster, faster!

nataShkaNatashka, Natashka!You’re as sweet as fruit pie,Honey sweet,You haven’t been in the stove,You haven’t felt the heat.The ducks struck up the band,The cranes went off to dance,Stepping out on their long legs,Stretching out their long necks.

the CoLoneLThe colonel went off for a walkCaught himself a little quail;The quail, poor bird, wanted to drink,And flew up and away,Then fell and was lost under the ice,Caught a priest, a priest’s son,Piotr Petrovich.

the oLd man and the hareThe town stands empty.In the town is a bush;In the bush sits an old manAnd cooks a stew:Up runs a squint-eyed hareAnd asks for some stew:The old man ordersThe one without legs to run,The one without arms to grasp,And the naked one to put in his pocket.

Literal translations by Nicholas Winter

16

Igor Stravinsky

Suite no. 2 for Small orchestra

ComPoSed1914–1917, as piano pieces

1921, orchestrated as Suite no. 2

fIrSt PerformanCeMarch 2, 1926; Haarlem, the Netherlands. The com-poser conducting

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeNovember 12, 1940, Orchestra Hall. The composer conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeSSeptember 21 & 23, 2003, Orchestra Hall. william Eddins conducting

CSo PerformanCe, the ComPoSer ConduCtIngJuly 13, 1963, ravinia Festival

InStrumentatIontwo fl utes and piccolo, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, horn, two trumpets, trombone and tuba, percussion, piano, strings

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme5 minutes

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Stravinsky began to compose what he called “easy” pieces. Small in scale and relatively simple to perform, they could be dismissed as mere trifl es, except that the clarity of their style and textures,

and the simplicity of their forms point to the next stage in Stravinsky’s ever-changing, chameleonlike career—the back-to-basics sensibilities of Th e Soldier’s Tale and the great neoclassic scores.

He later fashioned two short suites for small orchestra that are collections of “easy” piano pieces written between 1914 and 1917. Th e earliest of them, published as Th ree Easy Pieces for piano duet, are the March, Waltz, and Polka that were later orchestrated as the opening movements of the Second Suite performed this week. Stravinsky referred to them as “music-hall” numbers, and their popular dance forms certainly suggest that Stravinsky had set his sights far

from the grand ballet houses where he had made his name. Th e Polka was dedicated to Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the Russian Ballet, and Stravinsky said it was inspired by the vision of Diaghilev as a whip-cracking ringmaster in evening dress and top hat. Composed during the war (Stravinsky decorated the March with car-toonlike drawings of fi re-belching cannons), the Th ree Easy Pieces were fi rst performed in 1919 by Stravinsky and José Iturbi. By then, Stravinsky had written a new group of Five Easy Pieces for his young children, Th eodore and Mika, to play. (Suite no. 2 borrows the Galop from the Five Easy Pieces as its fourth-movement fi nale.)

Stravinsky sent all eight of these easy pieces to the writer André Gide, who tried them out with a young student and was furious that Stravinsky had neglected to include rehearsal numbers to help keep the players together (“You fi nd your place just as you lose the child, or the child loses his place . . .”). Th at’s when Stravinsky decided not to entrust these little jewels to amateurs and children any longer, but to dress them in sophis-ticated orchestral colors and publish them as grown-up suites.

17

maurice ravel

Une barque sur l’océan

Alborada del gracioso

In 1902, a group of young artists, linked by their progressive mindset, their pride in being “avant-garde,” and a fascination with Debussy’s new opera Pelleas and Melisande, began meeting on Saturday nights at the

painter Paul Sordes’s house on the rue Delong. Th ey called themselves the Apaches. Maurice Ravel was one of the founding members, along with the writer Tristan Klingsor (his pseudonym, combining two Wagnerian heroes, openly advertising his artistic inclinations), who wrote the poems Ravel set as Shéhérazade; and the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes, who would premiere many of Ravel’s greatest piano pieces, and who was also a friend of Debussy. (Viñes, who had scarcely been west of Paris, suggested the group’s American Indian name.)

Sometime in 1904, Ravel got the idea of com-posing a set of fi ve piano pieces, each dedicated to one of his Apache friends. After Ravel had started writing these Miroirs (Mirrors), Viñes told him that Debussy was thinking of compos-ing music so free it would seem improvised or torn from a sketchbook. Ravel seemed intrigued. Perhaps inspired by the thought of a fresh kind of music and by the incipient rivalry—or at least healthy competition—with Debussy, Ravel broke

new ground with his fi ve piano pieces. “My Miroirs,” he said, “marked such a considerable change in my harmonic development that it dis-concerted those musicians who were most famil-iar with my style up to that point.” Th e score did signal a turning point in his writing, and, despite Ravel’s fears, it won him even more followers.

When Viñes gave the premiere in January 1906, the fourth piece, Alborado del gracioso, was so enthusiastically received that it had to be encored. One reviewer praised the entire set and called two of the movements “absolute masterpieces.” But the infl uential critic Pierre Lalo (son of the composer of Symphonie espag-nole) dismissed the music as imitation Debussy, which can’t have pleased Ravel or Debussy. Comparisons with Debussy, both revealing and superfi cial, would plague Ravel for the rest of his life. “If I have been infl uenced by Debussy,” Ravel wrote late in his career, in his Autobiographical Sketch of 1937, “I have been so deliberately, and have always felt that I could escape him whenever I chose.”

Only months after the premiere of Miroirs, Ravel decided to orchestrate the third of the fi ve pieces, Une barque sur l ’océan (A boat on the ocean), which he had dedicated to the Apaches’ fi rst host, Paul Sordes. (When their long, late Saturday nights got too noisy for Sordes’s rue Delong neighbors, the group moved to the studio of Maurice Delage, one of Ravel’s few students.) Nearly every piece of Ravel’s orchestral

Une barque sur l’océanComPoSed1904–1905, as the third of fi ve pieces in the piano suite Miroirs

1906, orchestrated

fIrSt PerformanCeFebruary 3, 1907; Paris, France

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSdecember 30, 1970, January 1 & 2, 1971, Orchestra Hall. Aldo Ceccato conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeSdecember 4, 5 & 7, 2003, Orchestra Hall. Pierre Boulez conducting

InStrumentatIonthree fl utes and two piccolos, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, celesta, two harps, strings

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme7 minutes

18

Alborada del graciosoComPoSed1904–1905, as the fourth of five pieces in the piano suite Miroirs

1918, orchestrated

fIrSt PerformanCe

May 17, 1919; Paris, France

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSMarch 6 & 7, 1925, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeSNovember 5, 6, 7 & 10, 2009, Orchestra Hall. Bernard Haitink conducting

InStrumentatIonthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, crotales, triangle, tambourine, castanets, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, xylophone, two harps, strings

aPProxImate PerformanCe tIme7 minutes

CSo reCordIngS1957. Fritz reiner conducting. rCA

1968. Jean Martninon conducting. rCA

1991. daniel Barenboim conducting. Erato

music we know today started out either as music for the ballet (even Boléro, now a concert hall regular, was meant to be danced) or for solo piano. It’s remarkable how music brilliantly conceived for the sonorities of the piano has come to be celebrated for the imagination and aptness of its orchestral color. Ravel’s close friend Roland-Manuel explained that “this metamor-phosis of piano pieces into symphonic works was a game for Ravel, a game played to perfection, so that the transcription outdid the charm of the original.”

U ne barque sur l ’océan was bound to raise comparisons with Debussy. Ravel’s little sea picture was written at the

same time as Debussy’s La mer, his magnificent symphonic seascape, as well as the first of his piano Images, “Reflets dans l’eau” (Reflections in the water). All three of these works, which take the illusive nature of water as their subject matter, stake out new ground in music’s ability to convey the seemingly inexpressible. (It would have been fascinating to accompany Viñes to the Debussys’ apartment that afternoon in February 1906 when he played through the Images for the composer and his wife, and then, at Debussy’s request, introduced them to Ravel’s Miroirs.)

Une barque sur l ’océan is a brief barcarole—no more dramatic and no less fascinating than the play of light on the rolling waves. Ravel never underestimated the power of the miniature, perfectly realized. With his uncanny ear for color and exquisite detail—a single triangle stroke, as fleeting yet momentous as a flash of sunlight, or a tiny viola solo, just four measures long, after a giant wave of sound—a few pages of keyboard

arpeggios and black-key glissandos have become sea and air, light and wind.

R avel did not orchestrate Alborada del gracioso, the fourth of the piano pieces, until 1918. The piano original, dedi-

cated to the critic M.D. Calvocoressi, with its impossibly fast repeated notes, is so rich and evocative that orchestrating it must have seemed redundant at first. But Ravel’s extraordinary imagination for sound and the finesse of his instrumental writing make the newly redecorated Alborada one of his greatest sonic achievements.

Alborada means morning music, just as serenade means night music. It’s related to the French aubade and the troubadour’s alba (lit-erally “white of dawn”), by which means lovers are warned of the approaching dawn in time to dampen their passions and part company. (This requires the participation of a loyal watchman or friend—like Brangäne in Tristan and Isolde, whose warnings are famously ignored.) In the more common Spanish tradition, it’s simply any music performed at daybreak, often to celebrate a festival or honor a person—or both, such as a bride on her wedding day. To his Alborada, however, Ravel adds or “of the buffoon,” clouding the picture with the introduction of the standard grotesque lover, akin to Don Quixote of ancient Castillian comedy. And so we have a highly spirited, almost outrageous dance that begins with the strumming of a guitar (here given to the pizzicato strings and the harp) and concluding with a grand and glorious racket.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra