Program

Thursday, March 29, 2012, at 8:00Friday, March 30, 2012, at 8:00Saturday, March 31, 2012, at 8:00Sunday, April 1, 2012, at 3:00

mitsuko Uchida Conductor and Piano

StravinskyConcerto in D Major for String OrchestraVivace—Arioso: Andantino—Rondo: Allegro

mozartPiano Concerto No. 18 in B-flat Major, K. 456Allegro vivaceAndante un poco sostenutoAllegro vivace

MiTSuKO uChiDA

IntermISSIon

mozartAdagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546

mozartPiano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K. 271 (Jeunehomme)AllegroAndantinoRondo: Presto

MiTSuKO uChiDA

ONE huNDRED TwENTy-FiRST 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

Saturday’s concert is sponsored by Walgreens.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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Concerto in D major for String orchestra

Igor StravinskyBorn June 18, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.Died April 6, 1971, New York City.

Shortly after Stravinsky con-ducted the world premiere of

his Symphony in C in Chicago in November 1940, he and his new wife Vera bought a house at 1260 North Wetherly in West Hollywood. In the spring of 1941, they moved in. It would remain their home for nearly two decades, and there, only a few houses away from the flash and hubbub of Sunset Strip, Stravinsky would compose nearly all his last works, including the Mozartean opera The Rake’s Progress; Agon, his first venture into the twelve-tone world; and this piece for string orchestra.

During the war years, Los Angeles was a refuge for a great many expatriates, and the Stravinskys enjoyed the company of a large and varied circle of friends, including Rachmaninov, Thomas Mann, Alma Mahler

(and her husband, Franz Werfel), Rubinstein, and Aldous Huxley, who hooked him up with W. H. Auden to work on The Rake’s Progress. Mann later said that “Hollywood during the war was a more intellectually stimulat-ing and cosmopolitan city than Paris or Munich had ever been.” Schoenberg and his family were settled in nearby Brentwood Park, but the two men, each viewed by the other as “the opposition,” never met once. “Musicians came from all over the world to visit them,” Robert Craft wrote, “not mention-ing to one composer their meetings with the other one.”

Stravinsky became a U.S. citizen in 1945. In 1946, he received his first European commission in a dozen years, a request from Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and patron, for a work to celebrate

ComPoSeD1946

FIrSt PerFormanCeJanuary 27, 1947, Basel, Switzerland

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeNovember 2, 1972, Orchestra hall. Daniel Barenboim conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeAugust 2, 1975, Ravinia Festival. lawrence Foster conducting

InStrUmentatIonstring orchestra

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme12 minutes

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the twentieth anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra he had founded at the age of twenty. Over the past two decades, Sacher had introduced several important scores in Basel, including Bartók’s Divertimento, as well as his land-mark Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. The twentieth-anniversary concert, which was held on January 27, 1947, held new work Sacher had commissioned—Bohuslav Martinů’s Toccata e due canzoni, Arthur Honneger’s Fourth Symphony, and Stravinsky’s Concerto in D, which is some-times called his Basel Concerto (primarily to distinguish it from his other Concerto in D, for violin and orchestra).

Stravinsky’s Concerto in D is one of his final essays in his particular brand of neoclassicism. It flirts with both D major and D minor as its primary tonal anchors and is obsessed in general with the inter-val of a minor second, but it also

toys with many other keys and with the blurring of tonal boundaries in its itinerary. Stravinsky writes three movements, with two spirited sec-tions embracing the central Arioso, with its big, elegant B-flat melody.

In 1951, Stravinsky’s score was choreographed by Jerome Robbins as The Cage, a horror story about murderous insects, and premiered by the New York City Ballet on June 10. The Cage was a great suc-cess, despite the fact that Robbins’s subject and Stravinsky’s music make an odd match—as The New York Times opening night review noted, “It is set upon the music of Stravinsky’s Basler [sic] Concerto for strings, which is by no means vicious or brutal in character, with a curious fitness that does it no violence whatever.” The Cage has often been revived over the years—it is part of the New York City Ballet’s current season—but the concerto itself remains a rarity in the concert hall.

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Piano Concerto no. 18 in B-flat major, K. 456

In 1785, Leopold Mozart spent ten weeks in Vienna visiting his

son. It is clear from his letters home to Nannerl, Wolfgang’s sister, that he was thrilled by it all; enjoyed being introduced around town as Wolfgang’s father; and felt relief, mingled with surprise, to see that his son had made a success of it without him. Leopold arrived on February 11, just in time for a bitter cold snap that lasted till the first of March, leaving the streets piled with snow and several people dead of frostbite.

Leopold soon saw that his son’s life in Vienna was a whirlwind of public appearances. “Since my arrival,” he later wrote to Nannerl, “your brother’s fortepiano has been taken at least a dozen times from the house to the theater or to some other house.” The night Leopold arrived, Friday the eleventh, he heard Wolfgang play the great D minor piano concerto for the first

time; the next evening he listened to Wolfgang’s three new string quartets, and with even greater delight to the famous remark Joseph Haydn made that night: “Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me in person or by name.” And this was only Saturday.

On Sunday, February 13, Wolfgang played “a masterful concerto that he wrote for Paradis. I had the great pleasure of hearing all the interplay of the instruments so clearly that for sheer delight tears came to my eyes. When your brother left the stage, the emperor tipped his hat and called out ‘Bravo Mozart!’ and when he came on to play, there was a great deal of clapping.” That concerto was appar-ently this work in B-flat major, the one Mozart had entered in his new catalog on September 30, 1784, and Ludwig Köchel would

Wolfgang mozartBorn January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria.Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria.

ComPoSeDEntered in catalog September 30, 1784

FIrSt PerFormanCeunknown

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeFebruary 21, 1952, Orchestra hall. Myra hess, piano; Rafael Kubelík conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeMay 31, 2009, Orchestra hall. Benedetto lupo, piano; Bernard labadie conducting

InStrUmentatIonsolo piano, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, strings

CaDenzaSMozart

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme29 minutes

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later reckon as number 456 in the composer’s output.

Maria Theresia von Paradis was a pianist, composer, and singer who had been blind from early childhood. In 1784, when Mozart composed the concerto for her, she was twenty-five, three years younger than Mozart. That year was the busiest of Mozart’s hectic life, a flurry of productivity that prompted Mozart finally to open a blank book and begin a detailed registry of his works or else lose track forever. In the span of this one year, Mozart wrote six of his most magnificent piano concertos. The first and the fourth were written for his pupil Barbara Ployer, and two were for his own concerts—“They are both concertos to make you sweat,” he told his father. The fifth in the series is this lovely B-flat concerto for Maria Theresia, the blind vir-tuoso whose name is a fair descrip-tion of the music contained within.

Like its neighbors (K. 451, 453, and 459), the concerto opens with rhythmic martial music, though there are no trumpets and drums in the orchestra. It is a forceful open-ing, and this is strong material, but the rest of the first movement proceeds more like chamber music, animated by the interplay of instru-ments that so touched Leopold and a piano solo that is more discreet and conversational than flamboy-ant. The simultaneous clarity and

intricacy of the wind writing is especially remarkable.

The slow movement is more intimate still, and darker in tone. It is a theme with five variations and a hefty coda instead of a sixth. (Each of the variations is repeated; since Mozart writes out the repeat each time from variation 2 onward, varying the material in slight but significant ways, there are in effect nine distinct varia-tions.) This is minor-key music, frequently enlivened by the shift to major—just the opposite of the first movement.

The finale is quick and lively, with hunting horn fanfares, and, among an abundance of surprises, a passage in the remote key of B minor with the winds in 2/4 and the strings in 6/8. The piano enters the dispute, argues briefly and persuasively for 2/4, then sides with the strings and sweeps everyone along to a cheerful 6/8 finale.

The Mozart Family. Painted by Johann Nepomuk della Croce, Salzburg, 1780–81

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adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546

Shortly after he moved to Vienna in 1781, Mozart began to

spend his Sunday afternoons at the home of Gottfried van Swieten, where a small group of music lovers gathered each week to play through music by older masters. Swieten, one of the most powerful politi-cians of the day, had been delighted to encounter the works of Johann Sebastian Bach when he lived in Berlin, and it was in Swieten’s Viennese salon that Mozart too fell under the spell of Bach’s music. Swieten had an impressive private library, its shelves filled with for-gotten works by Bach and Handel. At Swieten’s Sunday matinees, Mozart and his fellow enthusi-asts played through these scores with a mixture of excitement and discovery—sometimes they read through entire Handel oratorios with Mozart at the piano. For Mozart, these Sunday gatherings

provided not just a thrilling history lesson, but a change in the way he began to think about writing music. From that point on, counterpoint began to play a more crucial role in Mozart’s output.

In 1782, Mozart wrote to his sister back in Salzburg,

Baron van Suiten [sic], whom I visit every Sunday, gave me all the works of Handel and Sebastian Bach to take home with me after I had played them through to him. When Constanze heard the fugues she fell quite in love with them. She will listen to nothing but fugues now. . . . Having often heard me play fugues off the top of my head, she asked if I had ever written any down, and when I said I had not, she scolded me very thoroughly for not having written anything in

Wolfgang mozart

ComPoSeD1786, based on fugue for two pianos of 1783

FIrSt PerFormanCeunknown

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeFebruary 9, 1894, Auditorium Theatre (Fugue). Theodore Thomas conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeApril 7, 1979, Orchestra hall. Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

InStrUmentatIonstrings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme9 minutes

CSo reCorDIngA 1976 performance of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor with Sir Georg Solti conducting was released on From the Archives, vol. 4.

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this most artistic and beautiful of musical form.

The Adagio and Fugue per-formed this week is what came from Constanze’s scolding. It began as a grand fugue for two pianos, composed in 1783. Five years later, Mozart decided to make an arrangement for strings, prefacing it by “a short adagio,” as he described it in his catalog, as a kind of dramatic introduction. The Adagio finds Mozart at his most daring and expressive. The fugue demonstrates how closely Mozart had studied Swieten’s Bach scores—he also transcribed several of Bach’s fugues, not only to give them a new performing life, but also as a way to get inside them and see precisely how they were put together. Mozart entered the Adagio and Fugue for strings in his thematic catalog on June 26, 1788,

the same day as his Symphony in E-flat—the one we know as no. 39.

A postscript. On his way to Berlin the next year, Mozart stopped off in Leipzig to visit Bach’s church, where he improvised on the organ for an hour. Bach’s suc-cessor there, who sat beside him at the organ, said “old Sebastian Bach has risen again.” Mozart then studied Bach’s autograph scores, “the parts spread all around him, held in both of his hands, on his knees, and on the adjoining chairs.”

Mozart’s wife Constanze. Oil portrait by Joseph Lange painted about 1782, Vienna

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Piano Concerto no. 9 in e-flat major, K. 271 (Jeunehomme)

Mozart completed this piano concerto the month he turned

twenty-one. It is his first true masterpiece. The 270 works that precede it in Ludwig von Köchel’s catalog reveal music of exceptional skill and occasional greatness—a number of those scores are much loved and regularly performed today. But with this concerto, Mozart indicated for the first time that he would be remembered not as a musician of charm and remark-able fluency, but as a composer of historical significance and emo-tional depth.

The concerto is full of the energy, inspiration, and innovation that often characterize the first mature efforts of great composers. And like many early works, the precise circumstances of its com-position are not known. Evidently Mozart was inspired—or perhaps commissioned—by a touring

French pianist, Mlle Jeunehomme, who visited Salzburg in the last months of 1776. We know very little about her background or her talent. We don’t even know her first name, and Mozart himself made a mess of the one that has come down to us: “die jenomy” he writes in a letter (Mozart’s father turns that into “genommi”). But it is Mozart’s name, not hers, that is forever established in the history books, although it was another seven years before he wrote a concerto to match it. Mlle Jeunehomme may have played the piano at the first performance of the concerto, but Mozart quickly took it up. We know that he played it in Munich on October 4, 1777; he was still performing it in Vienna in the 1780s.

In this, his first large-scale piano concerto, Mozart acknowledges the problem posed by the classical

Wolfgang mozart

ComPoSeDcompleted January 1777

FIrSt PerFormanCesometime in 1777

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeNovember 21, 1902, Auditorium Theatre. Raoul Pugno, piano; Theodore Thomas conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeApril 28, 2007, Orchestra hall. Jeffrey Kahane, con-ducting from the keyboard

InStrUmentatIonsolo piano, two oboes, two horns, strings

CaDenzaSMozart

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme31 minutes

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concerto—that the traditional orchestral opening before the soloist’s entrance often seems like a long-winded tease—and then sets out to solve it “in a manner as brutal and as simple as breaking the neck of a bottle to open it,” as Charles Rosen writes. Mozart’s solution is to bring in the piano unexpectedly in the second mea-sure, to answer the orchestra’s fanfare-like opening. Mozart never tried this trick again, recognizing that novelty does not require repeti-tion, although Beethoven makes something quite wonderful of the idea in his last two piano concertos.

After Mozart’s unorthodox opening, the orchestra continues with a traditional exposition. But the piano’s breech of etiquette is not easily forgotten, and throughout the first movement the usual relation-ship between soloist and orchestra is questioned at every turn. The movement becomes a game of who plays what—and when. Even at the very end, in the orchestral wrap-up that follows the soloist’s cadenza, the piano scorns convention again and makes one last appearance.

With this concerto, Mozart gives us the first of his great slow movements. (In Mozart’s day, andantino usually meant a tempo slightly slower than andante—it’s just the reverse today.) Like much of Mozart’s most expressive instru-mental music, this movement is an opera scene without singers. The piano part is elaborate and highly expressive—as rich as the music of any operatic heroine—and the tone is dark and contemplative, at times genuinely tragic. Despair has seldom been represented with such simplicity. The emotional make-up of the movement is complicated; Mozart, perhaps better than any other composer, knew how to trace the complexities of the human heart. The brilliant finale is a rac-ing, virtuoso rondo that stops once for a gracious, full-scale minuet—perhaps included to make Mlle Jeunehomme feel at home—shortly before the final getaway.

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

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