Program

Wednesday, November 14, 2012, at 7:30 (non-subscription concert)Thursday, November 15, 2012, at 8:00Saturday, November 17, 2012, at 8:00

Charles Dutoit ConductorDaniil Trifonov Piano

mussorgskyA Night on Bald Mountain

TchaikovskyPiano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso—Allegro con spiritoAndantino sempliceAllegro con fuoco

DANiil TrifONOv

InTermIssIon

stravinskyThe Rite of SpringThe Adoration of the EarthThe Sacrifice

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

This concert is part of the 2012–13 Rivers exploration.

The appearance of Daniil Trifonov is endowed in part by the Nuveen Investments Emerging Artist Fund.This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Comments by PhilliP huscher

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A Night on Bald Mountain (Edited and reorchestrated by Nikolai rimsky-Korsakov)

modest mussorgskyBorn March 21, 1839, Karevo, Russia.Died March 28, 1881, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

When Mussorgsky died at the age of forty-two, he left his

work in a shambles, with many of his compositions unfinished (of his seven operas, only Boris Godunov was complete), and so it was left to others to make his talent known. Only minutes after Mussorgsky was pronounced dead, Rimsky-Korsakov declared that he would take on the task of oversee-ing Mussorgsky’s musical estate, which to him meant not only collecting and organizing sketches and manuscripts, but also complet-ing his friend’s work. Although Rimsky-Korsakov acknowledged Mussorgsky’s genius—“full of so much that was new and vital”—he felt (not always with justification)

that much of the music needed to be edited and corrected.

Although Rimsky-Korsakov rightly considered the comple-tion of Mussorgsky’s final opera, Khovanshchina, as the most important of his assignments, little of Mussorgsky’s other music escaped his editorial hand. And so, like Khovanshchina and the piano set Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky’s only major orchestral piece, A Night on Bald Mountain, was introduced in a version con-cocted by Rimsky-Korsakov.

For many years, Mussorgsky toyed with the idea of writing an opera based on Gogol’s story “Saint John’s Eve.” In the summer of 1867, when he visited his brother’s

ComPoseD1867

FIrsT PerFormanCeOctober 27, 1886 (rimsky-Korsakov edition)

FIrsT Cso PerFormanCeApril 4, 1919, Orchestra Hall (rimsky-Korsakov edition). frederick Stock conducting

mosT reCenT Cso PerFormanCeNovember 2, 2002, Orchestra Hall (rimsky-Korsakov edition). William Eddins conducting

InsTrumenTaTIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, harp, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, bells, strings

aPProxImaTe PerFormanCe TIme12 minutes

Cso reCorDIngs1959. fritz reiner conducting. rCA

1968. Seiji Ozawa conducting. rCA

1977. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

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country estate, he decided instead to write an orchestral piece about the satanic revelry that takes place on Saint John’s Eve. The composer summarized the action as:

Subterranean sounds of super-natural voices.—Appearance of the spirits of darkness, followed by that of Satan himself.—Glorification of Satan and celebration of the Black Mass.—The Sabbath revels.—At the height of the orgies the bell of the vil-lage church, sounding in the distance, disperses the spirits of darkness.—Daybreak.

The score led several lives. Rimsky-Korsakov claimed that Mussorgsky originally composed it for piano and orchestra and then decided to rework it for orchestra alone. In characteristic fashion, Mussorgsky later reused it as an interlude in his comic opera, Sorochintsky Fair. Rimsky-Korsakov was particularly cavalier with A Night on Bald Mountain, and the piece he conducted in 1886

was largely of his own design, loosely based on Mussorgsky’s manuscripts. “I selected out of the material left upon the composer’s death everything that was the best and most suited for making of it a

well-coordinated whole,” he wrote in the preface to his edition. This score is, then, one man’s view of A Night on Bald Mountain. But, with his unsurpassed ear for demonic color and sinister atmosphere, Rimsky-Korsakov made from Mussorgsky’s tale a ghost story of irresistible and enduring power.

Rimsky-Korsakov

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Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23

In a famously wrong snap judg-ment, Nikolai Rubinstein said

that Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto—a concerto the composer wanted him to play—was worthless and, in fact, unplayable. Rubinstein, the director of the Moscow Conservatory and normally an ardent champion of Tchaikovsky’s works (he conducted the world premieres of the early symphonies and Romeo and Juliet), was “not only the best pianist in Moscow but also a first-rate all-round musician,” Tchaikovsky later said, explaining why he had approached Rubinstein in the first place.

Tchaikovsky met with Rubinstein at the Moscow Conservatory on December 24, 1874. After playing

through the first movement for him, the composer was greeted with complete silence. “If only you knew,” he later wrote to Nadezhda von Meck, “what a foolish and unbearable situation it is to offer a friend a dish one has cooked oneself and to have that friend eat and say nothing!” Undeterred, though clearly rattled, Tchaikovsky played on to the end of the concerto. Then Rubinstein didn’t mince words, declaring that the concerto was “impossible to play, that the passages were hackneyed, clumsy, and so awkward that there was no way even to correct them, that as a composition it was bad, vulgar.” Except for two or three pages, Rubinstein ventured, the score had

Piotr TchaikovskyBorn May 7, 1840, Viatka, Russia.Died November 18, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

ComPoseDNovember 1874–february 21, 1875

FIrsT PerFormanCeOctober 25, 1875, Boston

FIrsT Cso PerFormanCeOctober 16, 1891, Auditorium Theatre (inaugural CSO concert). rafael Joseffy, piano; Theodore Thomas conducting

mosT reCenT Cso PerFormanCesJanuary 8, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Stephen Hough, piano; Sir Mark Elder conducting

July 29, 2012, ravinia festival. Denis Matsuev, piano; James Conlon conducting

InsTrumenTaTIonsolo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings

aPProxImaTe PerFormanCe TIme33 minutes

Cso reCorDIngs1955. Emil Gilels, piano; fritz reiner conducting. rCA

1982. Cecile licad, piano; Sir Georg Solti conducting. Clarion (on video)

1985. András Schiff, piano; Sir Georg Solti conducting. london

2003. lang lang, piano; Daniel Barenboim conduct-ing. Deutsche Grammophon

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to be completely redone. Angry and deeply wounded, Tchaikovsky left the room without responding. Later that evening, Rubinstein went to see him at home and, without softening his original appraisal, proposed that if the composer made numerous radical changes, he would reconsider performing it. Tchaikovsky replied, “I will not change a single note and will publish it exactly as it is now!”

On January 9, Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Anatoly that he had fallen into a “great depression” over the holidays. “There is no one here whom I might call a friend in the true sense of the word,” he continued, pointedly referring to Rubinstein, whom until recently he had considered one of his clos-est friends, and he admitted that he was still recovering from the blow to his composer’s pride. That winter, however, he sent the piano concerto to Hans von Bülow, a pianist and conductor best known for his championship of Wagner’s music (he led the premieres of both Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger). “The ideas are so original, so noble, so powerful,” Bülow wrote back, “and the details so interesting; though there are many of them, they do not impair the clearness and unity of the work. The form is mature, ripe, and distinguished in style.” Although Bülow had retired from the concert stage during the 1860s (after his wife Cosima left him for Wagner) and had only recently resumed his career, he now became the dedi-catee of the concerto and agreed to play the premiere of the work

in Boston, where it was advertised as a Grand Concerto. “To Boston is reserved the honor of its initial representation, and the opportu-nity to impress the first verdict on a work of surpassing musical interest,” the local announcement boasted, unaware that Rubinstein had already done so. The day after the premiere, Bülow sent what is thought to have been the first cable ever dispatched from Boston to Moscow, telling Tchaikovsky of the concerto’s undisputed triumph with the Boston public. The concerto has been overwhelmingly popular ever since, and in 1941 it even inspired a hit song, “Tonight We Love,” which was rather unscru-pulously hacked from its broad opening phrases.

The concerto’s celebrated intro-duction, with its radiant string

melody riding over the piano’s thunderous chords, is both its best-known and most puzzling concept. After a dramatic horn call, Tchaikovsky establishes the “wrong” key of D-flat major and then intro-duces a theme so splendid, so complete, and so satisfying as it stands that, despite audience expectations, it will never return. Although this makes

Nikolai Rubinstein

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for a potentially lopsided design (with the most familiar music over before the concerto proper begins), Tchaikovsky’s subsequent material is of such dazzling color, flair, and orchestral brilliance that the remainder of the score is not a letdown, even after such a breath-taking opening chapter.

The main body of the first movement—it begins with nervous, jumpy passagework—introduces a clarinet melody Tchaikovsky said he heard played by an itinerant musi-cian at a local fair. This is a large, finely detailed movement, filled with characteristic Tchaikovskian touches like the barrages of quadru-ple octaves in the piano solo, and capped by an expansive cadenza.

The remaining two movements are brief in comparison. The Andantino is part slow movement, part scherzo; it’s all lightness and effortless charm. The main theme of the playful midsection is based on “Il faut s’amuser et rire” (Laugh and enjoy yourself), a chanson

associated with Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt, whom Tchaikovsky courted in the late 1860s, and, at least for a few days, even thought of marrying. The finale includes a Russian dance derived from a Ukrainian melody and ends with a majestic coda that manages to match the grandeur and sweep of the concerto’s opening without once recalling its main theme.

A postscript on first impressions. It didn’t take long for Nikolai

Rubinstein to admit his mistake, and shortly after the premiere he began to play the concerto with great success—“What was impos-sible in 1875 became thoroughly possible in 1878,” Tchaikovsky observed. He quickly became a celebrated interpreter of the work, and the composer and the pianist-conductor renewed their friendship. After Rubinstein’s death in 1881, Tchaikovsky composed a piano trio in his honor and dedicated it “to the memory of a great artist.”

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The Rite of Spring (scenes of Pagan russia in Two Parts)

In 1911, Stravinsky began the score that would create the biggest

scandal in the history of music. He was already famous, just as Diaghilev had predicted—during rehearsals for The Firebird he pointed to Stravinsky and said, “Mark him well; he is a man on the eve of celebrity.” But Le sacre du printemps, or The Rite of Spring as we have come to call it, put him at the very forefront of the avant-garde and spread his name to corners of the world where news of the latest styles in French ballet rarely traveled. (Although when the score was suggested to Walt Disney

for his film Fantasia, he asked “The Sock?”, clearly never having heard of Le sacre.)

First, a word about the title. Stravinsky called his ballet Vesna svyashchennaya, Russian for “holy spring.” The painter Léon Bakst was the one who suggested Le sacre du printemps during rehearsals. The standard English version, The Rite of Spring, first used by Diaghilev for a London revival in 1921, was quickly sanctioned by a public tired of trying to get the French pronun-ciation right.

May 29, 1913, the night The Rite of Spring opened at the Théâtre

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

ComPoseD1911–12

FIrsT PerFormanCeMay 29, 1913, Paris

FIrsT Cso PerFormanCeNovember 7, 1924, Orchestra Hall. frederick Stock conducting

mosT reCenT Cso PerFormanCesJanuary 19, 2010, Orchestra Hall. David robertson conducting

July 8, 2011, ravinia festival. Christoph Eschenbach conducting

InsTrumenTaTIontwo piccolos, three flutes and alto flute, four oboes and two english horns, three clarinets, E-flat clarinet and two bass clarinets, four bassoons and two contrabassoons, eight horns, two Wagner tubas, four trumpets, high trumpet and bass trumpet, three trombones and two tubas, timpani, bass drum, tambourine, cymbals, antique cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, güiro (a scraped gourd), strings

aPProxImaTe PerFormanCe TIme35 minutes

Cso reCorDIngs1968. Seiji Ozawa conducting. rCA

1974. Sir Georg Solti conducting. london

2000. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec

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des Champs-Élysées, is one of the dates historians cite as the start of the modern age, like 1907, the year Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or 1922, when The Waste Land and Ulysses were published. As Pierre Boulez has written,

The Rite of Spring serves as a point of reference to all who seek to establish the birth certificate of what is still called “contemporary” music. A kind of manifesto work, somewhat in the same way and probably for the same reasons as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, it has not ceased to engender, first, polemics, then, praise, and, finally, the neces-sary clarification.

The premiere is engraved in all the music history textbooks first of all because of the outrage it provoked—in time, it has become the most notorious scandal in music and one of cultural history’s most cherished riots. The principal play-ers, in addition to Stravinsky, were Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario;

Pierre Monteux, the conductor; and Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer who was making his debut as a choreographer.

The scene has often been retold: the audience grew restless and noisy almost as soon as the music began, and when the dancing started, it erupted. “I have never again been that angry,” Stravinsky later wrote. “The music was so familiar to me; I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not heard it wanted to protest in advance.” There were catcalls and fistfights; one fight victim called out for a dentist. According to the artist Valentine Hugo, who was there (and made the four books of drawings that helped the Joffrey Ballet reconstruct the original production in 1987), the entire theater “seemed to be shaken by an earthquake.” Diaghilev flipped the house lights off and on to quiet the crowd. Nijinsky, recognizing imminent disaster, stood on a chair in the wings shouting numbers, directions, and general encourage-ment to his dancers. And all the while Pierre Monteux continued conducting. “He stood there appar-ently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile,” Stravinsky remem-bered. “It is still almost incredible to me that he actually brought the orchestra through to the end.”

The spectacle of the premiere has always overshadowed the fact that at the dress rehearsal, before an invited audience which included Debussy and Ravel, and at the subsequent performances, The Rite of Spring didn’t cause any commotion. And most reports of opening night fail to

Sergei Diaghilev (left) and Igor Stravinsky, 1921

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point out that, despite the revolu-tionary nature of Stravinsky’s music, it was the dancing that provoked the audience. (After the open-ing moments, it would have been difficult even to hear the orchestra. “One literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music,” Gertrude Stein later commented, with characteristic poetic license because, after all, she wasn’t actually there.) As Stravinsky was fond of remembering, after the first concert performance almost a year later, the crowd cheered and he was carried aloft through the theater and into the Place de la Trinité.

It’s impossible today to imagine the shock of a musical score that, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (written just over a century earlier), has had its freshness and daring dimmed by familiarity. When it was played in Chicago for the first time in 1924, its notoriety had cer-tainly preceded it, and the orchestra did everything in its power to lead audiences safely through it, including the onstage use of cue cards, lettered like movie subtitles, to announce the subdivisions of the score. (“Dissonant, barbaric, com-plex, rhythmically new,” the Herald & Examiner critic reported, “it

The rITe oF sPrIng (sCenes oF Pagan russIa In Two ParTs)

Here is the synopsis Stravinsky furnished for Serge Koussevitzky’s 1914 performance:

Holy Spring is a musical-choreographic work. it represents pagan russia and is unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of spring. The piece has no plot, but the choreographic succession is as follows:

first Part: The Adoration of the Earth: The spring celebration. it takes place in the hills. The pipers pipe and young men tell fortunes. The old woman enters. She knows the mystery of nature and how to predict the future. young girls with painted faces come in from the river in single file. They dance the spring dance. Games start. The Spring Khorovod [a round

dance]. The people divide into two groups, opposing each other. The holy procession of the wise old men. The oldest and wisest interrupts the spring games, which come to a stop. The people pause, trembling before the great action. The old men bless the spring earth. The Adoration of the Earth. The people dance passionately on the earth, sanctifying it and becoming one with it.

Second Part: The Great Sacrifice: At night the virgins hold mysterious games, walking in circles. One of the virgins is consecrated as the victim and is twice pointed to by fate, being twice caught in the perpetual circle. The virgins honor her, the Chosen One. They invoke the ancestors and entrust the Chosen One to the old wise men. She sacrifices herself

in the presence of the old men in the great holy dance, the great sacrifice.

ParT 1: The aDoraTIon oF The earThintroduction—The Augers of Spring—Dances of the young Girls—Mock Abduction—Spring round Dances—Games of the rival Tribes—Procession of the Sage—Adoration of the Earth—Dance of the Earth

ParT 2: The greaT saCrIFICeintroduction—Mystical Circles of the

young Girls—Glorification of the

Chosen One—Summoning of the Elders—ritual of the Elders—Sacrificial Dance of the

Chosen One

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crowds impressions and sensations upon the listener which, because of their complete novelty, cannot be assimilated at first hearing.”)

The most audacious of the musical innovations are certainly rhythmic. In the Augers of Spring, the famous section near the very beginning, a single massive chord repeated again and again, like a fast pulse, is shot through with irregu-larly spaced, unpredictable accents. It was murder on Nijinsky’s danc-ers, just as it is for listeners today who must prove their musicality by beating time. That section, at least, Stravinsky could notate in a conventional 2/4, with accents landing wherever they fell. But the final sacrificial dance was so new in its rhythmic conception that he couldn’t even find a way to put it on paper at first—even though he could play it at the piano. He eventually juggled bar lines and time signatures to correspond to what his hands wanted; the meter changes in nearly every measure (it begins 3/16, 2/16, 3/16, 3/16, 2/8, 2/16, 3/16).

There are many celebrated passages. Stravinsky layers dif-ferent strict, ticking ostinato patterns—the orchestra sounds like a clock shop gone mad—to create a tension unknown in music. There is that famous pounding chord itself, the heartbeat of the Augers of Spring, a prophetic mixture of two unrelated tonalities, with an F-flat chord on the bottom and an E-flat seventh chord on top. It’s tempting to regard The Rite of Spring as an anthology of brilliant effects, from the opening solo for

very high bassoon (quoted in all the textbooks on orchestration) to the giant whoosh with which the furi-ous final dance collapses. But it’s the cumulative sweep of rhythmic energy that gives the score a life all its own. The Rite of Spring is as tight and shrewdly paced as a Hitchcock thriller; it still leaves audiences gasping a hundred years after it was written.

A few words about the genesis of the music. Stravinsky claimed

his first “fleeting vision” of this piece came to him in the spring of 1910, as he was finishing The Firebird. “I saw in my imagination,” he later recalled, “a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” The scenario was planned in collabora-tion with the Russian painter and archeologist Nikolai Roerich, in the summer of 1910, before a note was written.

Stravinsky began to compose the music in Clarens, Switzerland, in the fall of 1911, at a small upright piano wedged into a room just eight feet square. It was in that room—with the piano, mercifully, muted for composing—that he hit upon the pounding chords of the Augers of Spring. Part 1 was finished early in January 1912, and he played through it for Pierre Monteux. “Before he got very far,” the conductor remembers, “I was convinced he was raving mad.” Early in June, Stravinsky persuaded Debussy to play through the four-hand arrangement of the score with

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him at a party. It was hardly typical party music, and when they were done, one guest recalls, “We were dumbfounded, overwhelmed by this hurricane which had come from the depths of the ages and which had taken life by the roots.” Stravinsky completed the entire score in sketch on November 17, “with an unbear-able toothache.” Rehearsals for the ballet lasted six months; Stravinsky uncharacteristically stayed away until the very end. Despite the dancers’ difficulties with the music’s

uncountable rhythms, rehears-als went on without incident. Stravinsky walked into the theater on May 29 unprepared for what would soon follow.

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

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