PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON

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

Thursday, October 6, 2016, at 8:00Friday, October 7, 2016, at 1:30Saturday, October 8, 2016, at 8:00

James Gaffigan ConductorMichael Mulcahy Trombone

FranckLe chasseur maudit

VineFive Hallucinations for Trombone and Orchestra

MICHAEL MULCAHY

World premiere

Co-commissioned by the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and by Kim Williams AM, Geoff Ainsworth, and Johanna Featherstone for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra

INTERMISSION

ProkofievSelections from Cinderella, Op. 87IntroductionShawl DanceThe Sisters’ New ClothesDancing LessonCinderella Dreams of the BallMazurka and Entrance of the PrinceCinderella’s Arrival at the BallGrand WaltzDuet of the Prince and CinderellaWaltz-codaMidnightThe Prince’s VisitThe Prince finds CinderellaAmoroso

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

César FranckBorn December 10, 1822; Liège, BelgiumDied November 8, 1890; Paris, France

Le chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman)

César Franck matured as a composer very late in life, but he first won acclaim as a child prodigy. He was born in Liège, in the French-speaking Walloon district of the Netherlands; this heritage was reflected in the mixture of French and Flemish in his name.

Early on he showed unusual musical talent, which his father, Nicolas-Joseph, set about nurturing, promoting, and finally exploiting. César made his first tour as a virtuoso pianist at the age of eleven, traveling throughout the newly formed kingdom of Belgium. (His specialty was playing variations on popular opera themes à la Liszt.)

Having outgrown the Liège Conservatory, two years later César moved to Paris, with his entire family in tow, for advanced study. When the Paris Conservatory initially rejected his applica-tion because of his Belgian birth, Nicolas-Joseph sent for French naturalization papers. César was an exemplary student, and he walked off with many top prizes. He was always interested in composing, but his father discouraged him from entering the prestigious Prix de Rome competition in the hope that he would devote his life to concertizing. Nicolas-Joseph even pulled César out of school in 1842 to send him off on

another recital tour, which was highlighted by a meeting with Franz Liszt, who encouraged him to keep composing.

Franck next won fame as an organist and a composer of organ music (his impassioned organ improvisations were greatly celebrated). Then, in middle age, he devoted himself to teaching, and, in the process, influencing an entire generation of French composers, including Ernest Chausson, who were nearly idolatrous in their devotion. Like Bruckner (with whom he has sometimes been compared), Franck came into his own as a composer late in his career. His major works—the Symphony in D minor, the Violin Sonata and the Piano Quintet, the Symphonic Variations and several symphonic poems—were all com-posed between 1880 and 1890, the last decade of his life. He was sixty when he wrote Le chasseur maudit, his most popular symphonic poem.

Le chasseur maudit (The accursed hunts-man) was inspired by a ballade by the eighteenth-century writer Gottfried August Bürger. The story is neatly summarized in Franck’s score:

It was Sunday morning; in the distance there sounded the joyous ringing of bells and the religious chants of the crowd—Sacrilege! The savage Count of the Rhine has sounded his horn.

COMPOSED1882

FIRST PERFORMANCEMarch 31, 1883; Paris, France

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bells, cymbals, triangle, bass drum, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME15 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 18 & 19, 1898, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

August 6, 1944, Ravinia Festival. Désiré Defauw conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 18, 1957, Ravinia Festival. Carl Schuricht conducting

March 25, 26, 27 & 30, 2004, Orchestra Hall. Andrey Boreyko conducting

CSO RECORDING1946. Désiré Defauw conducting. RCA

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“Hallo! Hallo!” The hunt takes its course over grain fields, over meadow and moor . . . “Stop, Count, I beg you. Take care—No!”—And the chase goes hurtling on its way like a whirlwind.

All of a sudden the Count finds himself alone; his horse is loath to go further; the Count blows into his horn, but it will not sound again . . . A voice dismal, implacable, curses him; “Sacrilegious man,” it cries, “be forever hunted by hell itself!”

Then the flames leap up in all directions—the Count, seized by terror, flees, faster, always faster, pursued by a pack of demons . . . by daytime across abysses, at midnight through the air.

F ranck’s music brilliantly illustrates the tale, with hunting horns and church bells at the beginning, a frantic chase scene in

the middle, and a demonic curse from trombones and tuba at the end. Despite—or perhaps because of—its brilliant coloristic effects and thrilling narrative thrust, Le chasseur maudit was never a favorite of Franck’s own students, Chausson included, who were more attracted to his forward-looking ideas and his less picturesque works. But it was an immediate hit with the public. It was performed often during the early decades of the Chicago Symphony (the Orchestra played it for the first time only a month after it received its U.S. premiere in Cincinnati), but in the past fifty years, this work, like many char-acteristic products of the romantic era, has been unfairly overlooked.

Carl VineBorn October 8, 1954; Perth, Australia

Five Hallucinations for Trombone and Orchestra

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The neurologist and best-selling writer Oliver Sacks, who died last August, had a lifelong fascination with music. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the 1985 book of essays that first brought him a large

audience, he told the story of Dr. P., who can no longer make sense of his life and relies on Robert

Schumann’s music to keep his bearings by linking each everyday activity with a musical theme. (The tale was made into a one-act opera in 1986 by the English composer Michael Nyman, who incorporated Schumann’s music into his largely minimalist language.) Sacks himself was an accomplished pianist. His first musical memory was of his brother playing music by Bach. He later admitted that his musical tastes more or less ended with Brahms (he did confess a fascination with Stravinsky’s music). Countering Nietzsche’s boast that listening to

COMPOSED2016

These are the world premiere performances

Co-commissioned by the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and by Kim Williams AM, Geoff Ainsworth, and Johanna Featherstone for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo trombone, two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clar-inets and bass clarinet, two bassoons

and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drums, marimba, glockenspiel, tom-toms, crash cymbals, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, xylophone), harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME20 minutes

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Bizet had made him a better philosopher, Sacks once said: “I think Mozart makes me a better neurologist.” In 2007, near the end of his distinguished career, he published Musicophilia, a collection of essays devoted entirely to the relationship between music and the brain, and to the power of music to move and heal us. “One does not need to have any formal knowledge of music—nor, indeed, to be particularly ‘musical’—to enjoy music and to respond to it at the deepest levels,” he wrote. “Music is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly developed and esteemed.”

Carl Vine, the Australian composer, calls Musicophilia, “an awakening book in terms of brain function and musical awareness.” Vine’s musical background is extraordinarily wide ranging—from playing piano in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to lecturing on composition at the Sydney Conservatory; serving as artistic director of the chamber music organization Musica Viva Australia; and writing seven symphonies and ten concertos, as well as music for film, television, dance, and theater. But Vine has also said that he would have studied neurology if he had his life to live over. In his new composition, Five Hallucinations, written for CSO trombonist Michael Mulcahy, his friend of thirty years, and inspired by the writings of Sacks, Vine was able to unite these two passions in a single work.

After Mulcahy made his solo debut with the Chicago Symphony in 2000, performing Leopold Mozart’s Alto Trombone Concerto in D major, discussions got underway to commission a new work for him to play with the Orchestra. As the years passed and CSO music directors changed, Mulcahy considered some twenty different composers. But when he returned to his native Australia to record a CD of Australian trombone works, which included Carl Vine’s Love Song, he immediately knew that Vine was the right choice. After some thirteen years of searching—and another eighteen months before a contract with Vine was signed—the long-awaited Chicago commission was a reality.

After Sacks’s death last year, Vine decided to revisit the author’s Hallucinations, a classic study of sensory deceptions induced by everything from exhaustion to drugs. When he read Sacks’s phrase “hexagons in pink,” recalling the exact

image of his own drug-induced hallucination years ago, Vine contacted Mulcahy in Chicago with the kernel of an idea for his new score. Mulcahy was skeptical at first—he didn’t want anything too light or showy; he valued music that was dramatic and lyrical above all. But then he realized that Vine’s excitement—and the irresistible force of a composer’s inspiration—was what he wanted most of all: “Be led by your own muse,” he told Vine. Music, Sacks reminds us, in Musicophilia, “has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”

The composer comments on Five Hallucinations for Trombone and Orchestra

I n his book Hallucinations, the acclaimed British-American neurologist Oliver Sacks chronicles a wide range of hallucinatory

conditions reported by his patients throughout his illustrious career. I have chosen five of those cases as the inspiration for this concerto, creating an imaginary musical representation of each mental state. These particular hallucinations were comparatively benign for those who experienced them, and in some cases were positively welcome.

Hallucinations are fascinating phenomena—instantaneous random inventions of our brains overlaid on the sensation of common reality and indistinguishable from it. Many of us will expe-rience them in some way during our lives. When we sleep for example, we are aware that our brain is in free flight and its muddled dream scenarios are not real. On the edges of sleep however, we can confuse random mental impressions with reality, and are hallucinating. A typical example is hearing one’s name spoken by an unknown person; another is when the tail end of a dream impinges on perceived reality.

Sufferers of brain damage or a range of neurological disorders regularly hallucinate. Others without mental illness but under great stress or fatigue can also hallucinate, as of course can those who use psychotropic drugs. It is this bridge between the real world and some of the surprising ways in which our brains interpret the mundane reality around us that I find end-lessly fascinating.

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THE HALLUCINATIONS:

I smell the unicornOne of Sacks’s patients frequently hears complete sentences spoken outside herself while drifting off to sleep. The phrases have no special personal meaning, and bear witness to the extraordinary and unexpected creative power of the brain as it freewheels into sleep.

The lemonade speaksHearing voices is a hallucination common in schizophrenia, especially as threats or curses. Less threatening versions may be experienced by just about anybody on waking up, either disem-bodied or from inanimate objects. In this case an effervescent beverage has discovered the power of speech. What it says is not clear.

Mama wants some cookiesSufferers of Charles Bonnet Syndrome often hallucinate text or other visual material super-imposed repeatedly across their entire field of vision. The sentence “Mama wants some cookies”

is actually another auditory hallucination like “unicorn” above, but I’ve used some poetic license to imagine that incongruous sentence as text filling one’s entire visible world.

The doppelgängerMany people have experienced the sense of being followed when it is clear that it isn’t happening. A special version of this hallucination is the sense of being followed by oneself—a permanent mirror aping one’s every motion, and in extreme cases affording such close identification with the simulacrum that the individual swaps places with the doppelgänger.

Hexagons in pinkHallucinating repeated visual patterns like ara-besques and hexagons is common to many con-ditions including extreme migraine and the use of psychotropic drugs, and can be detected, for instance, in the repetitive decorations on Persian rugs. Losing control of one’s visible universe to a randomly reinvented geometrical animation can be disturbing, but it can also be pleasurable.

Sergei ProkofievBorn April 23, 1891; Sontsovka, UkraineDied March 5, 1953; Moscow, Russia

Selections from Cinderella, Op. 87

The rags-to-riches story of Cinderella, history’s first extreme makeover, dates back at least to mid-ninth century China. In Tuan Ch’eng-shih’s rendition, the earliest recorded version, the heroine is helped by a magical fish rather than a fairy

godmother, and wears golden, not glass, shoes. There have since been at least 350 versions of the fairy tale, including Charles Perrault’s classic seventeenth-century retelling (complete with fairy godmother, pumpkin carriage, and glass slipper) and a version by the Grimm brothers. Cinderella’s plight also has inspired poets Sylvia

Plath, Anne Sexton, and Judith Viorst (“ . . . And Then the Prince Knelt Down and Tried to Put the Glass Slipper on Cinderella’s Foot” from If I Were in Charge of the World and Other Worries). It often has been favored by Hollywood, from Mary Pickford’s 1914 film and Walt Disney’s classic 1950 animated version (highlighted by “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo”) to Jerry Lewis’s 1960 spoof, countless made-for-TV movies, and Drew Barrymore’s Ever After.

Cinderella hasn’t lacked successful musical treatments, either. Both Rossini’s Cenerentola and Massenet’s Cendrillon were popular in their day, and opera houses still stage both of them from time to time. Rodgers and Hammerstein intro-duced Cinderella to television in 1957 (it was their first TV musical) and Stephen Sondheim

Above: Portrait of the composer by Pyotr Konchalovsky, 1934

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COMPOSED1941–44

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 21, 1945; Moscow, Russia

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME43 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCEDecember 31, 1993, Orchestra Hall. Kenneth Jean conducting (Waltz and Midnight)

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJanuary 8, 9 & 10, 2004, Orchestra Hall. Sir Andrew Davis conducting (selections)

took her to Broadway in Into the Woods. But Sergei Prokofiev’s full-length 1945 ballet is arguably her finest musical outing.

Prokofiev was intrigued by fairy tales and supernatural stories as a child, and as a mature composer he returned to them throughout his career—as subject matter and for inspiration, and sometimes, during unusually tense times, as a kind of release. Prokofiev began Cinderella in 1941, in the shadow of war, in poor health

(that spring he suffered the first of several heart attacks), and with his eighteen-year marriage in shambles. In Cinderella’s tale, he found both diversion and a lesson. He clearly read, in this slim ugly-duckling tale, the larger message that Chicago philosopher Bruno Bettelheim would later famously articulate in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

 . . . that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence—but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.

Still, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Prokofiev set aside Cinderella (he had composed the first two acts in piano score) and turned his attention to the more heroic, weighty subject of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he wanted to make into an opera. He worked on little else but the opera throughout the war, returning to Cinderella only when War and Peace was finished in the summer of 1943. He com-pleted the ballet in the early fall and orchestrated it the following year.

Prokofiev’s Cinderella focuses on the love between Cinderella and the Prince—“the birth and flowering of that feeling, the obstacles thrown in its path, the realization of the dream.” Since he began the score immediately after leaving his wife for another woman, Prokofiev’s understanding of obstacles and dreams was obviously deeply personal. Perhaps remembering how his earlier ballet, Romeo and Juliet, had at first been denounced as “undanceable,” Prokofiev

Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother. Illustration by Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) for The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales: From the Old French retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, London (also New York), Hodder & Stoughton, 1910

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set out to write numbers “that would emerge naturally from the story line, that would be var-ied, that would allow the dancers to do enough dancing and to exhibit their technique.” As a result, the complete score to Cinderella is more of a collection of individual set pieces than a tightly integrated symphonic whole. Although Prokofiev arranged three different orchestral suites of excerpts shortly after the 1945 premiere, for these performances James Gaffigan has drawn his own selection of numbers from the original ballet.

(Performed in sequence, Gaffigan’s set takes five numbers from act 1, six from act 2, and three from the third act.)

W e begin, like the full ballet, with introductory music capturing the two sides of Cinderella—the uncertain,

brooding thoughts of the persecuted heroine, fol-lowed, in one of Prokofiev’s most inspired lyrical outbursts, with violins sailing high over rippling, wind-swept chords, by the hope of her dreams. From there, we move forward through some of Prokofiev’s most richly characterized music, including the first act Shawl Dance, where the nasty stepsisters, bickering over their embroidery, rip a shawl in half; and their Dancing Lesson, in which they decimate a simple gavotte. The high point of act 2 is the rapturous grand waltz for Cinderella and the Prince (the longest number in the ballet). Their subsequent love duet—a great pas de deux—is cut short when the entire orches-tra, transformed into a furiously ticking clock, strikes midnight. In the third act, the Prince searches for Cinderella, with his magic slipper in hand. Finally, in the orchestral equivalent of a happy ending, the sweep of Cinderella’s most impassioned music suggests that dreams do come true as the two lovers are reunited.

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

Cinderella on her way to the ball. Illustration by Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) for The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales: From the Old French retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, London (also New York), Hodder & Stoughton, 1910

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