Program

Thursday, March 22, 2012, at 8:00Saturday, March 24, 2012, at 8:00

Kirill Petrenko Conductormarc-andré Hamelin PianoChristopher martin Trumpet

mussorgsky, orch. ShostakovichTwo Excerpts from KhovanshchinaPreludeDance of the Persian Maidens

ShostakovichPiano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 35Allegro moderatoLentoModeratoAllegro brio

MArC-ANDré HAMELiNCHriSTOPHEr MArTiN

IntermISSIon

rachmaninovSymphony No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 44Lento—Più vivoAdagio ma non troppo—Allegro vivaceAllegro

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

Thursday’s performance honors the memory of Elizabeth Hoffman.

The appearance of Marc-André Hamelin is endowed in part by the Johnson & Livingston Families Fund for Piano Performance. 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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two excerpts from Khovanshchina (orchestrated by Dmitri Shostakovich)

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

On the evening of February 23, 1881, Mussorgsky suffered a

severe fit of alcoholic epilepsy; three more attacks followed the next day. On February 26, he was taken to the Nikolayevsky Military Hospital in Saint Petersburg, where he was given a sunny room with large win-dows. On March 14, Mussorgsky was visited by Ilya Repin, an artist who had wanted to paint the celebrated composer’s portrait for many years. Mussorgsky posed in a hospital chair; Repin, work-ing without an easel, painted on a table top. Repin’s famous portrait, finished in just four days, reveals the face of a sad and disturbed

man. Mussorgsky appears unkempt and bleary-eyed; his face is clouded by the troubles of a man sick from a life of heavy drinking. On Mussorgsky’s birthday, March 21, a hospital attendant disobeyed doctor’s orders and obtained a bottle of cognac for the composer. Mussorgsky died a week later.

During the last year of his life, Mussorgsky worked simultaneously on two operas, Khovanshchina and Sorochintsy Fair, and as a result he finished neither. The latter, based on a comic short story by Gogol, was begun in 1874. Khovanshchina, an epic retelling of the conflicts that beset Russia in the late

ComPoSeDbegun in 1872, unfinished at composer’s death

FIrSt PerFormanCefebruary 21, 1886, Saint Petersburg, russia (rimsky-Korsakov edition)

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeNovember 1, 1929, Orchestra Hall (Prelude). frederick Stock conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeMarch 29, 1997, Orchestra Hall (Prelude). Sir Georg Solti conducting

InStrumentatIonthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets, two bas-soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, tambou-rine, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, bells, celesta, two harps, piano, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme12 minutes

CSo reCorDIngS1997 (Prelude). Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

A 1957 performance with fritz reiner conducting was released on From the Archives, vol. 11.

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seventeenth century, had been in the works even longer. Mussorgsky started research and preliminary sketching in the summer of 1872; much of the score was written by 1876. Progress on Khovanshchina often was interrupted by Sorochintsy Fair, and as Mussorgsky’s drink-ing grew worse, lengthy and productive periods of composition became rare. Of the seven operas that Mussorgsky began during his lifetime, only Boris Godunov was finished before his death.

It was left to Rimsky-Korsakov to oversee Mussorgsky’s musi-cal estate, which meant not only collecting and organizing sketches and manuscripts, but complet-ing his friend’s work. Although Rimsky-Korsakov acknowledged Mussorgsky’s genius—“full of so much that was new and vital”—he felt that a great deal of the music needed editing and correcting. (Mussorgsky always knew that his talent was too unconventional to be understood by the musical establishment; the autobiographi-cal sketch he prepared in 1880, written in the third person, says: “Mussorgsky cannot be classed with any existing group of musicians, either by the character of his com-positions or by his musical views.”)

The first and most important of Rimsky-Korsakov’s assignments as trustee of Mussorgsky’s works was the completion and orchestra-tion of Khovanshchina, which was left in a particularly chaotic state.

Rimsky-Korsakov spent the first six months of 1882 sifting through the manuscripts. A vocal score was published in 1883, and the opera was staged in Saint Petersburg on February 21, 1886. Other famous hands soon busied themselves with Khovanshchina: for the first Paris production in 1913, both Stravinsky and Ravel orchestrated passages that Rimsky-Korsakov had omit-ted; Stravinsky even rewrote the final chorus. Since then, schol-ars and musicians, dissatisfied with Rimsky-Korsakov’s efforts, have attempted to reconstruct Mussorgsky’s original. The two excerpts performed at these con-certs use the orchestration prepared in 1958 by Dmitri Shostakovich.

The prelude to act 1 is dated September 1874 in Mussorgsky’s manuscript. The music depicts the sun rising over Moscow, illuminat-ing Red Square, the Kremlin, and Saint Basil’s Cathedral. A single melody is repeated, touched each time by the changing light of dawn; the great bells of Saint Basil’s begin to ring as the sun breaks through. The exotic Dance of the Persian Maidens was actually performed during Mussorgsky’s lifetime. It is said that the composer rushed home from a concert tour at the prospect of having the dance played and, for lack of time or energy, let Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrate it, never suspecting the role he would one day play in bringing Khovanshchina to completion.

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Piano Concerto no. 1 in C minor, op. 35

At the conservatory in his native Saint Petersburg, Shostakovich

could not decide whether to concentrate on composition or playing the piano. Years later he remarked, “If the truth be told, I should have done both.” For a while he did, achieving early and promis-ing success in both fields. In 1926, his First Symphony, written as a graduation exercise, took the music world by storm. The following year, he won an honorable mention at the International Chopin Congress in Warsaw.

Dmitri took his first piano les-sons at the age of nine, from his mother, who announced to the family after just two days, “We have an outstandingly gifted boy on our hands.” Her verdict, though possi-bly premature, proved accurate, and eventually Dmitri was good enough

to tackle Beethoven’s fiendishly difficult Hammerklavier Sonata. He began to perform in public in 1923, but by 1930 he decided to devote his time to composing, and for a while it looked as if he had retired from the stage for good. But two years later, he wrote a set of piano preludes, op. 34 to perform himself, and in 1933 he composed this piano concerto, which he introduced from the keyboard that October.

Shostakovich’s concerto breaks decisively from the grand Russian romantic tradition of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. It is scored not for the conventionally lush and oversized orchestra, but for piano “with the accompaniment of string orchestra and trumpet,” as Shostakovich originally wrote in the work’s title. It is filled with wit and high jinks in place of grand

Dmitri ShostakovichBorn September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg, Russia.Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia.

ComPoSeD1933

FIrSt PerFormanCeOctober 15, 1933, Leningrad, russia. The composer as soloist

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeDecember 27, 1949, Orchestra Hall. william Kapell, piano; Adolph Herseth, trumpet; Eugene Ormandy conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeSJune 12, 1999, Orchestra Hall. Constantin Lifschitz, piano; Adolph Herseth, trumpet; Mstislav rostropovich conducting

August 5, 2009, ravinia festival. Joyce yang, piano; Christopher Martin, trumpet; James Conlon conducting

InStrumentatIonsolo piano, trumpet, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme21 minutes

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melodic rhetoric. Its virtuosity is playful, and never self-important.

The unusual sonority and bracing tone of the work is obvious from the outset, when the piano and trumpet introduce themselves to each other with exaggerated courtesy in the first three measures. The texture is spare throughout the opening movement, and the piano often plays in empty octaves or crisp two-part counterpoint. The trumpet quickly proves that it is no mere accompanying instrument (despite Shostakovich’s original wording), and its glittering solo often adds just the right touch of humor to the proceedings.

The strings, alone and muted, begin the second movement, a mel-ancholy waltz. The piano eventually enters, playing in ghostly octaves, and then, after a stormy outburst, is joined by the haunting sounds of the trumpet, also muted. The next movement, scarcely big enough to stand on its own, is in fact a solo cadenza, with discreet string com-mentary. The finale, which begins without announcement, is pure comedy, delivered at top speed and

overflowing with circus tricks, one-liners, and plain old shtick.

After the success of this concerto, Shostakovich continued to make occasional appearances as a pianist, usually in chamber music, until the tremors in his arms made performing too difficult. He made sev-eral recordings playing his own works, including this concerto and the Cello Sonata with Rostropovich. When he wrote a second piano concerto in 1957, it was designed not for his own hands, but for those of his nineteen-year-old son Maxim. Shostakovich per-formed in public for the last time in 1964, at the festival organized by Rostropovich in Gorky.

The composer (left) accepts applause with Mstislav Rostropovich after the first performance of his Second Cello Concerto, September 25, 1966

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Symphony no. 3 in a minor, op. 44

Rachmaninov’s final symphony, his third, was also on the

program the last time he appeared with the Chicago Symphony, in November 1941, to play his Fourth Piano Concerto. The Orchestra Hall concert was something of a lovefest. “Many times during the last thirty-two years he has bowed his angular bow before a wildly demonstrating audience there after a session with the piano or the baton,” wrote the critic for the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Yet what awaited him in the same hall last night must have moved even his well disci-plined spirit to a little rejoic-ing. The audience rose to its feet in his honor not once but twice. The Chicago Symphony orchestra gave him a bril-liant fanfare. Palms pounded against enthusiastic palms at

frequent intervals thruout [sic] the evening.

The ovations, however, were largely for Rachmaninov the pianist, and he was as famous as any alive. But as a composer, he had long since been dismissed in serious music circles as sentimental, out of touch, and irrelevant. In 1941, his best-known work, the C-sharp minor prelude, was nearly fifty years old; the cornerstones of his concertizing career, his popular Second and Third piano concertos, had been composed just after the turn of the century. After the composer and his fam-ily escaped revolutionary Russia on December 23, 1917, he had written very little. (Thirty-nine of Rachmaninov’s forty-five opus numbers were finished before then.) He withdrew his Fourth Piano Concerto for revision after

Sergei rachmaninovBorn April 1, 1873, Semyonovo, Russia.Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, California.

ComPoSeDMay 1935–June 29, 1936

FIrSt PerFormanCeNovember 6, 1936, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeDecember 10, 1936, Orchestra Hall. frederick Stock conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeNovember 14, 2008, Orchestra Hall. Ludovic Morlot conducting

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme38 minutes

InStrumentatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contra-bassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, xylophone, triangle, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, celesta, harp, strings

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its disastrous early performances in 1927, and his only other major work, the Variations on a Theme by Corelli for solo piano, composed in 1931, left audiences cold. (When restless listeners coughed, he would leave out the next variation; on one tour he played the entire piece, complete, just once.) At a point when Schoenberg—almost his exact contemporary—Bartók, and Stravinsky all had new things to say, Rachmaninov was painfully aware that his music was out of step with the times. “I feel like a ghost wandering a world grown alien,” he said in 1926. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. The new kind of music seems to come, not from the heart, but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel.”

After his death, a year and a half following his last CSO appear-ance, the critical establishment was ready to write him off for good. As Virgil Thomson told the young playwright Edward Albee in 1948, “It is really extraordi-nary, after all, that a composer so famous should have enjoyed so little the esteem of his fellow composers.” The sacrosanct Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in its fifth edition, concluded its dismal appraisal of his output: “The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last and musicians never regarded it with much favor.” Rachmaninov had always worried that by split-ting his time between playing the piano, conducting, and composing, he had spread himself too thin. “I

have chased three hares,” he once said. “Can I be certain that I have captured one?” In the end, it was his reputation as a composer that mattered most to him. In his last works, Rachmaninov made his case for being remembered not as an old-school piano virtuoso, or as a composer of romantic piano show-pieces, but as a genu-inely origi-nal compo-sitional talent. Those six pieces, com-posed during the last seven-teen years of his life, include a fourth piano concerto, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the Symphonic Dances, and this A minor symphony.

At the time of its premiere in Philadelphia in 1936, Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony was dismissed as the composer’s attempt to go modern (relative, that is, to his earlier works, for it clearly does not speak the language of Schoenberg or Stravinsky). Rachmaninov wrote to a friend that “both audience and critics responded sourly” to the piece and later complained that he knew of only three people who liked it: the

Rachmaninov and Sir Henry Wood, a champion of the composer’s Third Symphony, 1938

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conductor Sir Henry J. Wood, vio-linist Adolf Busch—and himself. In Chicago, it was politely described in the Orchestra’s program book as “frugal, late Rachmaninoff, not the generous, flooding Rachmaninoff of the Second symphony.”

Rachmaninov was discouraged by the reception. “It has been heard once in every capital in the musi-cal world; it has been condemned in them all,” he said. “But it’s quite possible that in fifty years’ time it will be rediscovered like Schumann’s Violin Concerto and become a sensational success.” His words have proven more insightful than the grumblings of his critics.

Of Rachmaninov’s three sym-phonies, this is the most compact, the most closely argued, and, in fact, the most “modern.” It is the only one in three movements. Here, borrowing a design scheme he had already perfected in his concertos, he conflates elements of both slow movement and scherzo in the central section. He also incorporates two of his favorite devices—the use of a motto theme that appears in the beginning of the concerto and recurs in various disguises throughout the score, and the eventual arrival of the Dies irae melody from the plainsong Mass for the Dead (he had used it to splendid effect just two years earlier in the Paganini Rhapsody).

Rachmaninov originally had scored the opening motto for horns and trumpets—a conventional call to attention—but he later reconceived it as a mysterious and tantalizing theme, with solo clarinet over stopped horns and

a single muted cello. It gives the entire symphony a more expectant and suspenseful point of departure. The main body of the first move-ment is a standard sonata form in a fast tempo, launched by a long-breathed melody of remarkable flexibility and unpredictable stops and starts. A second theme, led by the cellos, is even old-school in its grand, lavish flow (contrary to the Chicago review, this is the “gener-ous, flooding” Rachmaninov of the Second Symphony).

The slow movement begins with the horn singing a new rendition of the motto theme to the accompani-ment of the harp. What follows is a rapid, ever surprising sequence of ideas that eventually leads into a full, triplet-driven scherzo. That, it turns out, is only an episode within the larger Adagio, and when the slow music returns, to round out the central movement, it is changed, not only by Rachmaninov’s rich and imaginative rescoring, but by the haunting effect of emerging from the scherzo itself.

The finale is all energy and brightness—we are now in the land of brilliant A major. After a daz-zling fugal midsection, the mood darkens suddenly, though only temporarily, with the introduction of the Dies irae theme. The close, however, is an extended virtuoso romp for the entire orchestra—a reminder that Rachmaninov was still one of the grand showmen of twentieth-century music.

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

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