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PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, June 4, 2015, at 8:00
Saturday, June 6, 2015, at 8:00
Ludovic Morlot Conductor
Denis Kozhukhin Piano
Gershwin
An American in Paris
Ravel
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major
(In one movement)
DENIS KOZHUKHIN
INTERMISSION
Stravinsky
Jeu de cartes, Ballet in Three Deals
Deal 1—
Deal 2—
Deal 3
Ravel
La valse
The concert on June 4 is made possible by a generous gift from the Zell Family Foundation.
These performances are made possible in part by a generous gift from the estates of Maurice and Hynda Gamze.
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
George Gershwin
Born September 26, 1898, Brooklyn, New York.
Died July 11, 1937, Hollywood, California.
An American in Paris
George Gershwin’s first
musical memory was of
an automatic piano in a
penny arcade on 125th
Street playing Anton
Rubinstein’s Melody in F.
One of those rare pieces
that had become a
popular classic, it gave
Gershwin the idea at an
early age that serious and commercial music
could be one and the same. Gershwin’s own
music is so popular today that it’s hard to
remember his classical roots. As a teenager, he
attended recitals by celebrity soloists such as Josef
Lhevinne and Efrem Zimbalist, and he kept a
scrapbook of photos of big-name composers,
from Liszt and Wagner to Busoni. He played
piano in the Beethoven Society Orchestra at
Public School 63, and he studied music theory as
well as piano. Even after George quit school at
fifteen to become “probably the youngest piano
pounder ever employed in Tin Pan Alley,” he
didn’t forget his greater aspirations.
In the early twenties, while Gershwin was
turning out a steady stream of hits (and making
the kind of money that is unheard of in the classical music business), he was more determined than
ever to write serious music that was equally popular. The historic premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, at
New York’s Aeolian Theater in 1924, announced
to the music world that Gershwin was a far more
complex and ambitious musician than a mere
songwriter. (And just to confuse matters, that
same year Gershwin produced some of his finest
songs, including “Fascinating rhythm.”) During
the mid-1920s, while he enjoyed the life of a
rich celebrity, collecting modern art and moving
his family out of their dreary apartment into a
five-story townhouse on the upper West Side,
Gershwin began to compose a piano concerto,
three piano preludes, and this tone poem—a love
song to Paris—while still maintaining his roles as
pianist, tunesmith, and conductor.
In January 1928, Gershwin accepted an invitation to visit friends in Paris. Recognizing the need
for a change from the frenetic New York scene—
he currently had two hit shows, Funny Face and
Rosalie, running simultaneously—Gershwin
immediately started thinking about a “rhapsodic
ballet,” which he quickly titled An American in
Paris. By the time he and his brother Ira boarded
a steamer for Europe on March 9, George had
already sketched the work in versions for one and
two pianos. Once in Paris, he continued to work
on the score, and he spent one entire afternoon
shopping the auto supply stores on the Grande
Armée in search of the ideal car horns for the
traffic scene he had in mind. (He took four horns
home with him for the New York premiere.)
COMPOSED
1928
February 13, 1945, Orchestra Hall.
Désiré Defauw conducting
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 13, 1928, New York City
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
April 17, 18, 19 & 22, 2014, Orchestra
Hall. Leonard Slatkin conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
June 14, 1933, Auditorium Theatre.
William Daly conducting (Chicago
World’s Fair: A Century of Progress
International Exposition)
July 25, 1936, Ravinia Festival. William
Daly conducting
2
bassoons, four horns, three trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass
drum, bells, cymbals, snare drum,
taxi horns, tom-toms, triangle, wire
brushes, woodblock, xylophone,
celesta, strings
July 11, 2014, Ravinia Festival. Robert
Moody conducting
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
19 minutes
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes
and english horn, two clarinets and
bass clarinet, three saxophones, two
CSO RECORDING
1990. James Levine conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
When Gershwin arrived in Paris, he was
as famous as any living musician. Even in
Europe his best songs, such as “The man I love,”
“Someone to watch over me,” and “Fascinating
rhythm,” were whistled on the street, and
Rhapsody in Blue was the most talked about
piece of music in a city that had, in the last
fifteen years, seen the premieres of The Rite of
Spring and Daphnis and Chloe. Gershwin was
the toast of the town, and during his visit he met
and played the piano for all the resident “serious” composers, from Francis Poulenc, Darius
Milhaud, and Sergei Prokofiev to William
Walton. He also renewed his friendship with
Maurice Ravel, whom he had just met at a birthday party for the French composer the previous
month in New York City. (That night, Ravel
listened while Gershwin played the piano until
4 a.m.; another evening the two went off to hear
jazz in Harlem.)
Birthday party honoring Maurice Ravel, New York
City, March 7, 1928. From left: conductor Oskar Fried,
mezzo-soprano Éva Gauthier, Ravel at the piano,
composer-conductor Manoah Leide-Tedesco, and
composer George Gershwin
On his way home from Paris, Gershwin
stopped in Berlin, where he met Kurt Weill (just
weeks before the premiere of The Three Penny
Opera), and in Vienna, where he attended the
premiere of Ernst Krenek’s jazz-tinged opera,
Jonny spielt auf, and met twelve-tone master
Alban Berg. At Berg’s invitation, Gershwin
attended a performance of Berg’s new Lyric Suite.
Afterwards, when the performers insisted, he sat
down at the piano and played show tunes and
a few measures of Rhapsody in Blue, to which
Berg reportedly responded, equivocally, “Music
is music, Mr. Gershwin.” Gershwin became a
great admirer of Berg’s work. An autographed
photo of the composer later hung on the wall of
Gershwin’s Hollywood home, alongside those
of Irving Berlin and Jack Dempsey. (After
Gershwin’s death, Oscar Levant recalled that
the composer often played his recording of the
Lyric Suite, and that a piano-vocal score of Berg’s
opera Wozzeck was one of his prized possessions.)
B efore the premiere, Gershwin told a
reporter that An American in Paris was
“written very freely and is the most
modern music I’ve yet attempted.” It was certainly Gershwin’s most accomplished orchestral
work to date. For the first time, Gershwin’s
trademark jazzy rhythms, bluesy harmonies, and
unforgettable melodies are all woven into a big,
sophisticated work of symphonic dimensions.
By 1928, Gershwin had developed a fine ear
for orchestral color and a sense of cinematic
panorama. (The title page of the score specifies
that the work was “composed and orchestrated” by Gershwin, to counter complaints
that Gershwin had left the scoring of Rhapsody
in Blue to others.) It is also Gershwin’s first
concert work that doesn’t call for a solo piano
(the manuscript shows that several passages
featuring the instrument were later crossed out).
Despite Gershwin’s claim that he hadn’t
written program music (the play-by-play scenario printed in the score and often quoted is
by Deems Taylor, not Gershwin), the work is
unforgettably descriptive, from its opening walking music (think Gene Kelly, Hollywood, 1951)
to the car-honking traffic jam. Gershwin did
identify the American’s “spasm of homesickness”
after too many drinks in a street café, although
neither he nor Taylor managed to explain the hot
Caribbean rhythm midway through. An American
in Paris was a hit at its New York premiere, just
months after Gershwin came home. The audience loved it, but the critics roared their disapproval, betraying their disbelief that a work of
concert music could be both popular and ambitious, tuneful and complex, fashion-conscious
yet unforgettable. 3
Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major
Had Paul Wittgenstein’s
career as a concert pianist
gone according to plan,
this and several other
works for piano and
orchestra wouldn’t exist.
He was born into one of
Vienna’s most remarkable
families; his father Karl, a
steel, banking, and arms
magnate, and his mother Leopoldine, brought
nine children into the world. Paul was the
seventh child; the eighth was Ludwig, who
became one of the leading philosophers of the
twentieth century.
The Wittgensteins were an obsessively
musical family. Their palatial Viennese home
contained seven grand pianos (including two
Bösendorfer Imperials), and a grand statue of a
nude Beethoven towered over their Musiksaal.
Brahms, Strauss, Schoenberg, and Mahler were
only a few of the famous guests who climbed the
marble staircase to join the family’s celebrated
gatherings. All the Wittgensteins “pursued music
with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered
on the pathological,” writes Alexander Waugh
in his new book about the family, The House of
Wittgenstein. Paul studied piano with Theodor
Leschetizky and made a successful debut in
1913. Early the next year, he enlisted in the
Austrian army. A few months later, while serving
on the Russian front, he was shot and seriously
COMPOSED
1929–30
FIRST PERFORMANCE
January 17, 1933; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
February 15 & 16, 1945, Orchestra Hall.
Robert Casadesus as soloist, Désiré
Defauw conducting
August 4, 1960, Ravinia Festival.
John Browning as soloist, William
Steinberg conducting
4
wounded; his right arm was amputated and he
was taken prisoner by the Russians.
Being a member of a distinguished family of
overachievers and survivors, and raised by a father
of forceful determination, Wittgenstein didn’t
intend to give up his career as a pianist. (That
same oppressive upbringing led his two eldest
brothers to commit suicide.) While confined
to the invalid ward of a Siberian P.O.W. camp,
he began to “play” a Chopin piece on a wooden
box with his single hand, inventing ways for five
fingers to encompass both melody and harmony.
After the war was over, Wittgenstein took
what many would consider his greatest asset,
family money, and commissioned more than
a dozen pieces for piano left-hand from some
of the world’s leading composers, including
Maurice Ravel, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin
Britten, Richard Strauss, and Sergei Prokofiev.
Wittgenstein wasn’t particularly fond of any of
the pieces he commissioned—it’s questionable
why, given his conservative tastes, he approached
such modern-minded composers to begin with.
Shortly before he died he admitted that, of all
the composers he asked, he felt closest to the
Austrian post-romantic Franz Schmidt.
Wittgenstein eventually came to regard Ravel’s
concerto as a masterpiece, but only after living
with it for some time and having words with the
composer. “It always takes me a while to grow
into a difficult work,” Wittgenstein said later. “I
suppose Ravel was disappointed, and I was sorry,
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
November 5, 6, 7 & 10, 2009, Orchestra
Hall. Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist,
Bernard Haitink conducting
August 7, 2012, Ravinia Festival.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist, James
Conlon conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
solo piano, three flutes and piccolo,
two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet,
two bassoons and contrabassoon,
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle,
side drum, cymbals, bass drum,
woodblock, tam-tam, harp, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
19 minutes
but I had never learned to pretend. Only much
later, after I’d studied the concerto for months,
did I become fascinated by it and realize what a
great work it was.”
Ravel was already writing a piano concerto—
the well-known one in G—when Wittgenstein’s
commission arrived. He was intrigued by the
challenge and set aside the other concerto for this
one almost at once. He studied what little music
he knew for left hand, including Saint-Saëns’s
six studies and Leopold Goldovsky’s transcription of Chopin’s etudes (difficult music to
begin with, now rendered virtually unplayable).
He probably also knew Brahms’s transcription
of J.S. Bach’s famous chaconne for violin and
perhaps Scriabin’s Two Pieces for left hand,
op. 9. Ravel’s concerto is a real tour de force filled
with sounds that regularly suggest two hands at
work. Although Wittgenstein criticized the way
Ravel played it, it’s not clear that Wittgenstein’s
interpretation was significantly better (his two
recordings are not completely convincing).
Ravel admitted to his publisher that
planning the two piano concertos simultaneously was an interesting experience. The
one in which I shall appear as the interpreter
is a concerto in the truest sense of the
word: I mean that it is written very much
in the same spirit as those of Mozart and
Saint-Saëns. . . . The concerto for the left
hand alone is very different. It contains many
jazz effects, and the writing is not so light.
In a work of this kind, it is essential to give
the impression of a texture no thinner than
that of a part written for both hands. For
the same reason, I resorted to a style that is
much nearer to that of the more solemn kind
of traditional concerto.
Ravel picked up his jazz effects on his 1928 trip
to the United States, where he met bandleader
Paul Whiteman and spent several nights visiting
jazz clubs in Harlem with George Gershwin.
(He also conducted the Chicago Symphony
in January and continually complained about
Paul Wittgenstein
American food.) In a lecture he gave in Houston,
he said,
May this national American music of yours
embody a great deal of the rich and diverting
rhythm of your jazz, a great deal of the emotional expression in your blues, and a great
deal of the sentiment and spirit characteristic
of your popular melodies and songs, worthily
deriving from, and in turn contributing to, a
noble heritage in music.
T he concerto is one long movement, with
an opening slow section followed by an
allegro. As Ravel promised, it’s a serious
work, particularly compared to his other concerto, but hardly solemn. After much orchestral
fanfare, the piano enters with a virtuosic cadenza;
Ravel described it as an improvisation, although
as with all things in Ravel, it’s meticulously
worked out. This is followed by music recalling
the nights he spent in American jazz clubs.
“Only gradually,” Ravel wrote, “is one aware
that the jazz episode is actually built up from the
themes of the first section.” It’s clear from Ravel’s
melodies that he has learned all about blue notes,
just as, in La valse and the Valses nobles et sentimentales, the quintessential Frenchman wrote
perfect Viennese waltzes. The final cadenza
provides spectacular ripples of arpeggios and
a singing melody, all with just five fingers. 5
Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.
Died April 6, 1971, New York City.
Jeu de cartes, Ballet in Three Deals
Igor Stravinsky stood on
the Orchestra Hall stage
in January 1935 to conduct
the Chicago premieres of
Pulcinella and The Fairy’s
Kiss, as well as his popular
ballet scores for Petrushka
and The Firebird. While he
was in America that
winter, Stravinsky talked
with Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg
about writing a new work for the recently formed
American Ballet and its choreographer, George
Balanchine. The subject, they all agreed, was
Stravinsky’s choice. The composer recalls:
More than a decade prior to the composition
of Jeu de cartes [The card game], I became
aware of an idea for a ballet in which dancers, dressed as playing cards, would perform
against a gaming-table backdrop of green
baize. I have always been interested in card
games (and in cartomancy, too), and I have
been a cardplayer all my life, since I first
played durachki as a child. While composing
Jeu de cartes, poker was a favorite pastime
in the rest periods between composition,
but the origins of the ballet, in the sense of
the attraction of the subject, antedate my
knowledge of card games. They are probably
to be traced back to childhood holidays
at German spas; my first impression of a
COMPOSED
1936
FIRST PERFORMANCE
April 27, 1937; New York City. The
composer conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
February 22, 23 & 27, 1940, Orchestra
Hall. The composer conducting
July 22, 1956, Ravinia Festival. Georg
Solti conducting
6
German casino, at any rate—the long rows
of tables at which people played baccarat or
bezique, roulca or faro, as now in the bowels
of ocean liners they play bingo—is still a
vivid memory. I remember now, too, and
remembered when I composed the music,
the “trombone” voice with which the master
of ceremonies at one of these spas would
announce a new game. “Ein neues Spiel, ein
neues Glück” [A new game, a new chance],
he would say, and the rhythm and instrumentation of the theme with which each of
the three “deals” of my ballet begins are an
echo or imitation of the tempo, timbre, and
indeed the whole character of that invitation.
Stravinsky wrote The Card Game after he
returned to Paris. The score was finished in
November 1936 and sent off to Balanchine. By
the time Stravinsky came back to America early
in 1937, Balanchine had completed the first
two deals. Lincoln Kirstein remembered how
Stravinsky would “appear punctually at rehearsals and stay on for six hours. In the evenings,
he would take the pianist home with him and
work further on the tempos.” He sometimes
suggested a few well-considered changes in
the choreography, and once even wrote a bit of
additional music to accommodate Balanchine’s
ideas. But he didn’t like the costumes inspired
by elaborate tarot card designs: “I insisted that
the artist copy some contemporary and very
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
June 29, 1971, Ravinia Festival. Bruno
Maderna conducting
January 31, February 1 & 2,
2002, Orchestra Hall. Daniele
Gatti conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes
and english horn, two clarinets, two
bassoons, four horns, two trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass
drum, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
22 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1993. Sir Georg Solti. London
ordinary playing cards from the
JEU DE CARTES: THE BALLET SCENARIO
corner drugstore.”
Stravinsky conducted the first Although the music to Stravinsky’s ballet is continuous, the following breakdown of the action may help those who wish to follow the game play by play.
performance, which was given
at the old Metropolitan Opera
DEAL 3
DEAL 2
DEAL 1
House. The Card Game was a
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
success, both for Stravinsky
Waltz-Minuet
March (Hearts
Pas d’action
and Balanchine. Stravinsky
and Spades)
Presto (Combat
Dance of the Joker
claimed to remember little of
between Spades
Four Solo Variations for
Waltz-Coda
the evening, “probably because
and Hearts)
the Four Queens (in the
order Hearts, Diamonds,
I was conducting and my nose
Final Dance (Triumph
Clubs, Spades)
of the Hearts)
was in the score.” His music
Variation of the Four
didn’t fail to make a favorable
Queens (pas de quatre)
impression, with its witty
and Coda
allusions to Ravel, Tchaikovsky,
March and Ensemble
Beethoven, and a particularly
cheeky reference to the overture
to The Barber of Seville near the end of the third
the perfidious Joker, who believes himself
deal. Shortly after the premiere, the composer
invincible because of his ability to become any
went to California, where he was, by all accounts, desired card.
thrilled to meet Charlie Chaplin. The next time
During the first deal, one of the players
Stravinsky came to Chicago, in February 1940,
is beaten, but the other two remain with
he led the Chicago Symphony in its first perforeven “straights,” although one of them holds
mances of The Card Game.
the Joker.
The official synopsis according to
In the second deal, the hand that holds the
Stravinsky follows.
Joker is victorious, thanks to four Aces who
easily beat four Queens.
Igor Stravinsky on The Card Game
Now comes the third deal. The action becomes
more and more acute. This time it is a struggle
he characters in this ballet are the chief
between three “flushes.” Although at first victocards in a game of poker, disputed
rious over one adversary, the Joker, strutting at
between several players on the green
the head of a sequence of Spades, is beaten by a
cloth of a card room. At each deal the situation is “Royal Flush” in Hearts. This puts an end to his
complicated by the endless guiles of
malice and knavery. T 7
Maurice Ravel
La valse (Choreographic poem for orchestra)
In 1911, Ravel’s Valses
nobles et sentimentales were
intended as a loving
tribute to the “useless
occupation” of social
dancing. By 1919, when
he wrote La valse, the
world was a changed
place, and after the war
the public had lost
patience with mere frivolity.
La valse is not the piece Ravel planned
to write. In 1906, he began to sketch Wien
(Vienna), a tribute to Johann Strauss, Jr.
and “. . . a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese
waltz, with which is mingled in my mind the
idea of the fantastic whirl of destiny.” This is still
true of the music Ravel finally composed in 1919,
at the request of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
But fate now made the waltz a bitter reminder
of a vanished era and newsreels showed that
Vienna was no longer a city in its glory. Due to
widespread famine, in 1918 the official daily food
rations there were 5.8 ounces of bread, 1.2 ounces
of flour, 1.6 ounces of meat, 0.175 ounces of fat,
0.9 ounces of sugar, and 2.45 ounces of potatoes
per person. That year, a flu epidemic broke out,
killing the painter Gustav Klimt, the architect
Otto Wagner, and Freud’s daughter Sophie.
Ravel finished La valse in 1920. It wasn’t
what Diaghilev expected and he refused to stage
it: “. . . this is not a ballet; it is a portrait of a
ballet, it is a painting of a ballet.” The two men
never worked together again. Nonetheless, Ravel
published the piece as a “choreographic poem for
orchestra,” and it was finally danced in Antwerp
in 1926 and in Paris in 1928 by Ida Rubinstein’s
troupe, which also gave the premiere of Boléro
just two days later.
The first page of the score is marked “mouvement de Valse viennoise.” The music is a
masterful evocation of the evasions and collisions
between a brilliant surface and dangerous undercurrents. Ravel provided a brief scenario:
Swirling clouds afford glimpses, through
rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds
scatter little by little; one can distinguish an
immense hall with a whirling crowd. The
scene grows progressively brighter. The light
of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
COMPOSED
1919–20
May 23, 2012, Orchestra Hall. David
Robertson conducting
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 12, 1920; Paris, France
CSO PERFORMANCES, THE
COMPOSER CONDUCTING
January 20 & 21, 1928, Orchestra Hall
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 9 & 10, 1923. Frederick
Stock conducting
July 5, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Ernest
Ansermet conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 25, 2010, Ravinia Festival.
Christoph Eschenbach conducting
8
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, three oboes
and english horn, two clarinets and
bass clarinet, two bassoons and
contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle,
snare drum, castanets, tam-tam,
antique cymbals, two harps, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
13 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1960. Fritz Reiner. CSO (Chicago
Symphony Orchestra: The First
100 Years)
1967. Jean Martinon. RCA
1976. Sir Georg Solti. CSO (From the
Archives, vol. 4: A Tribute to Solti)
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra