Harry Bicket Conductor Jennifer Koh Violin Jaime Laredo Violin

Program

Thursday, December 13, 2012, at 8:00Friday, December 14, 2012, at 1:30Saturday, December 15, 2012, at 8:00Tuesday, December 18, 2012, at 7:30

Harry Bicket ConductorJennifer Koh ViolinJaime Laredo ViolinScott Hostetler Oboe d’amore

J.S. BachBrandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B-flat Major, BWV 1051[Allegro]Adagio ma non tanto—Allegro

Charles Pikler, violaLi-Kuo Chang, viola

ClynePrince of Clouds

JeNNiFer KOhJAiMe LAreDO

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Co-commission

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

IntermISSIon

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

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StravinskyConcerto in e-flat Major for Chamber Orchestra (Dumbarton Oaks)Tempo giusto—Allegretto—Con moto

J.S. BachConcerto for Oboe d’amore in A Major, BWV 1055AllegroLarghettoAllegro ma non tanto

SCOTT hOSTeTLer

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances

J.S. BachConcerto for Two Violins in D Minor, BWV 1043VivaceLargo, ma non tantoAllegro

JeNNiFer KOhJAiMe LAreDO

CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.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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Brandenburg Concerto no. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051

Johann Sebastian BachBorn March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany.Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany.

Berlin is now only a short afternoon’s drive from the half

a dozen towns in East Central Germany where Bach lived and worked his entire life. (In sixty-five years, he never set foot outside Germany.) But in his day, the trip was much more arduous, and Bach didn’t travel that far unless he was sent on official business. He went to Berlin, apparently for the first time, in 1719, on an expense-account shopping trip, to buy a new, state-of-the-art harpsichord for his patron in Cöthen, a small, remote, rural town sometimes dismissively called “Cow Cöthen.” Bach wouldn’t recognize Berlin today, with its traffic jams and round-the-clock construction, but he was probably put off by its urban bustle even in 1719, for he had only a passing acquaintance

with large towns such as Leipzig and Dresden.

We don’t know exactly when Bach visited Berlin that year—on March 1, the Cöthen court treasury advanced him 130 thalers “for the harpsichord built in Berlin and travel expenses”—or how long he stayed. But he found time to make several useful contacts, none more beneficial to the future of music than the margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg, who asked Bach to send him some of his com-positions. At the time, Bach was preoccupied with inspecting the harpsichord that had been made to order by Michael Mietke, who was famous for the quality of his high-end, elaborately painted instru-ments, and with arranging to have it shipped back to Cöthen. But he didn’t forget the margrave’s request.

ComPoSeddate unknown

FIrSt PerFormanCedate unknown

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeFebruary 23, 1900, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeSApril 21, 2002, Orchestra hall. Pinchas Zukerman playing the viola and conducting

August 9, 2006, ravinia Festival. Jaime Laredo conducting

InStrumentatIonstrings without violins, harpsichord

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme18 minutes

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It would be another two years before Bach handed Christian Ludwig the carefully written “pre-sentation copy” of the six concertos we now call the Brandenburgs, after the margrave’s province just to the south and west of Berlin (its capital was Potsdam). Bach’s life, in the meantime, had been busy and unsettled. He had watched three family members (his ten-month-old son, his wife Maria Barbara, and his brother) die—a sudden spate of funerals, even in an age when life was short. He had gone to Halle

to compete for the job of organ-ist (he later declined the offer), which suggests that he was grow-ing restless in Cöthen, despite work-ing for an enlightened patron, the twenty-something Prince

Leopold, who “both loved and understood music.” (The prince’s sympathies would suddenly change in 1721 when he married a woman who “seemed to be alien to the muses.”) And, in addition to his daily workload at Cöthen, he was trying to finish some of his most important music, including the sonatas and suites for solo violin.

We don’t know when Bach wrote the six concertos

he dedicated to the margrave of Brandenburg. Recent scholarship suggests that most of them were already finished when he met the margrave (two of them possibly dating from 1713) and that he sim-ply took his time compiling a set of pieces, some old and some new, that he thought made a sufficiently varied and satisfying whole. The fifth concerto, for example, with its unprecedented star role for harpsi-chord, was surely written after Bach returned from Berlin, in order to inaugurate the new special-order instrument. The presentation score he gave the margrave is a “gift edition” of the set, almost entirely in Bach’s own meticulous hand-writing, prefaced by an elaborate dedication page written in French and dated March 24, 1721. “As I had a couple of years ago the plea-sure of appearing before Your Royal Highness,” Bach wrote, recounting how the margrave had praised his talent at the time and asked for “some pieces of my composition.” Bach simply but provocatively describes the contents as “concerts avec plusieurs instruments”—that is, concertos for many different combinations of instruments, a modest way of expressing one of the set’s most innovative features.

Since we have no record that the margrave ever arranged to have his concertos performed, he has often been unfairly portrayed as an unworthy patron who put the unopened score on his bookshelf and never thanked or paid Bach for his efforts. We probably will never know when or where these works were first played, but they were

Bach’s patron, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen

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obviously not widely known during Bach’s life. (The obituary prepared by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel doesn’t even mention them.) Only the Fifth, with its remarkable harp-sichord solo, was performed with any regularity in the years after the composer’s death; eventually, the whole set was forgotten. The earliest documented public performance of a Brandenburg Concerto dates from 1835, more than a century after they were written. Today they are argu-ably Bach’s most popular works.

Like many of Bach’s sets, such as the Goldberg Variations or The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos form a kind of master anthology—a demonstration, really, of all the imaginable possibili-ties inherent in a certain musical form. Each of these six concertos calls for a different combination of soloists—every one unprecedented in its choice of instruments and still without parallel today. Perhaps they represent Bach’s ideal, for their instrumentation corresponds neither to the Cöthen ensemble he conducted nor to the margrave’s own resident group of musicians. Bach gives solo roles to members of all three orchestral families, and often groups them in unexpected combinations, such as the trumpet, flute, oboe, and violin ensemble of the second concerto. All the

concertos demand and celebrate the performers’ virtuosity as much as they demonstrate Bach’s amazing skill. The union of joyful music making and compositional brilliance combine to put the Brandenburgs among those rare works that delight connoisseurs and amateurs alike.

Scored exclusively for low strings, the Sixth Brandenburg has the

most unusual sonority of all these concertos. What is most remark-able, however, is that Bach has managed to write music that is never somber, despite the unremit-tingly dark sound of his ensemble. Like the Third (the other all-string Brandenburg, which at least benefits from the brilliance of high violins), this concerto is a marvel of end-less variety, in color and texture, within a monochromatic world. The first movement, especially, is very densely woven and insistently repetitive, but in Bach’s hands it comes out lively and transparent. It is as if Bach had set himself the task of achieving the maximum contrast—both in the overall design of two full-ensemble movements surrounding an intimate viola duet, and within the shaping of the movements themselves—using a completely homogenous cast of instruments.

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Prince of Clouds

Prince of Clouds is Anna Clyne’s first concerto. For a composer

known for her love of collabora-tion, this double concerto is an extended family affair that links many strands in Clyne’s own life. The process began, in a sense, when violinist Jennifer Koh heard Clyne’s Within Her Arms, a haunting, deeply expressive work for fifteen solo strings (it was performed here on a MusicNOW concert in 2011) that Clyne completed in 2009 after the death of her mother. Clyne and Koh became friends and began to follow each other’s careers. Clyne heard Koh play a wide range of music, from Beethoven to Sibelius and Saariaho. Koh heard each of Clyne’s new works, and when she asked for a new piece to play herself, that idea quickly developed into a double concerto for Koh and violinist Jaime Laredo, who was Koh’s teacher and mentor at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. “When writing Prince of Clouds, I was contemplating the

presence of musical lineage—a family tree of sorts that passes from generation to generation,” Clyne writes of her piece. “This transfer of knowledge and inspiration between generations is a beauti-ful gift.” Concertos often become collaborative affairs, because many composers, including Brahms and Berg, have taken advantage of the opportunity to try things out on their soloists as they write. Early on, Clyne began a dialogue with Koh and Laredo, sending them snippets that she had composed—a dialogue that echoes the kind of close relationship that Koh and Laredo have long enjoyed, as well as the musical dialogue that Clyne writes for them in Prince of Clouds itself.

Prince of Clouds was commissioned by an unusually diverse group of organizations, including the Chicago Symphony, where Clyne has served as Mead Composer-in-Residence since 2010, and the Curtis Institute of

anna ClyneBorn March 9, 1980, London, England.

ComPoSed2012

FIrSt PerFormanCeNovember 3, 2012; Germantown, Tennessee

These are the first CSO performances

Commissioned by iriS Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Curtis institute of Music, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

InStrumentatIontwo solo violins, strings


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Music, the musical home, as it were, of both Koh and Laredo. The premiere was given in November by the IRIS Orchestra, another commissioner, and, after these Chicago performances, it will be played by the Curtis Chamber Orchestra on an East Coast tour in March. Throughout this series of performances, Prince of Clouds is being paired with Bach’s landmark concerto for two violins—composed some three hundred years before Clyne’s score—which provided the germ for the commission itself and served as a touchstone for Clyne as she was writing.

Last season, Chicagoans heard Night Ferry, premiered by the CSO and Riccardo Muti in February, which was the first of Clyne’s works to be performed by the Chicago Symphony. Clyne was born in London and raised in the U.K.—she wrote and performed her first fully notated piece for flute and piano at the age of eleven—and she also has lived and worked in Edinburgh, Ontario, and New York City. She holds degrees from Edinburgh University and the Manhattan School of Music. Clyne is now a full-time Chicagoan.

I spoke with Clyne about Prince of Clouds shortly after the premiere in

November. We talked in her studio, where a poem by Emily Dickinson, written out on a large canvas on one wall, is always in view: it is the source for the new work, A Sudden Shut, she is now compos-ing to be premiered on the CSO’s MusicNOW series on February 25.

How did the idea of writing specifically for Jennifer Koh and Jaime Laredo serve as a point of departure?Knowing that Jaime was Jenny’s mentor at the Curtis Institute, I instantly connected to the idea of musical lineage and musical family—a family that you recreate through the artistic community. It’s the same connection that I have with my composition teachers. You can trace back your heritage in a way.

What is the nature of the relationship between your two solo violins?From the beginning, I really wanted to create a sort of dialogue of intertwining melodies—actually the whole piece is based on the opening melody—a dialogue of passing ideas back and forth, which I think is one of the beautiful things about having a mentor-student relationship—that bounc-ing ideas off each other.

But the shape of the piece—the nature of their dialogue—is complicated.I knew that they could play very delicate, expressive melodies, but that they also could perform very rhythmic, fast, energetic music, so the piece really contrasts those two musical languages. The soloists move together through those two contrasting sound worlds.

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You knew all along that your piece was to be paired with the Bach double concerto. What does that work mean to you?It’s a piece that I love. I’m a big vinyl junkie, and I have a record of Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin that is scratched beyond belief.

Was Bach somehow in the back of your mind as you composed?As a composer, to have a piece of yours played back to back with Bach is the ultimate challenge. So I thought, why not use this as an opportunity to challenge myself—to really strip it down? What’s so incredible about Bach’s music is that every note is totally present. I was thinking of this when the CSO played Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in November: every line, every note is essential.

As a composer, it’s much more challenging to take it to the bare bones and find the skeleton of the piece. So, in the case of my piece, it’s just five lines of the ensemble and the two soloists.

In the score, you specify that the work should be played in a baroque style throughout. What does that mean?It’s a sound that I’m more drawn to—I feel like it has a certain earthiness and less vibrato. It’s as if the sound is being stripped down to its element in a way. Growing up

in England, I heard a lot of early music, a lot of period instruments, and that sound is very familiar to me. In a way, it’s about keeping the emotive power locked in a little bit, so that when it opens up, you feel it more. I’m very precise about the use of vibrato in this piece, so that vibrato is a color rather than a con-stant within the piece. As a string player, your natural instinct is to add vibrato, to warm the sound. So if that’s not the sound you want, you have to say so.

Has Bach’s music always played a role in your life?The two most influential composers for me are Bach and Stravinsky. Their music is completely timeless. And it speaks to something a bit more universal. My introduction to classical music was playing the cello in the Bach suites. It’s a world you can get totally lost in. I remember once performing one of the suites and completely forgetting that there was an audience there.

Has writing this piece in any way changed the way you will compose in the future?I think I’ll be more mindful of simplicity and think more about the musicians and their contribution to the whole. Exposed simplicity is a real challenge. I’m taking that idea into the piece I’m writing for MusicNOW.

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Concerto in e-flat major for Chamber orchestra (Dumbarton Oaks)

A magnificent Federal-style house, Dumbarton Oaks sits

on the crest of a wooded valley near Washington, D.C. After Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss bought the estate in 1933, it immediately became the scene of regular musical soirées. At the time, Mr. Bliss, the former ambassador to Argentina, was chairman of the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Music Department, and his wife Mildred was an unusually astute music lover, patron of the arts, and cultural maven (Sir Kenneth Clark called her “the Queen of Georgetown”).

The great music room at Dumbarton Oaks, with its tap-estries and paintings (including El Greco’s The Visitation) and its grand piano autographed by Jan Paderewski, a family friend, was the scene of many concerts hosted by the Blisses. It was their idea to com-mission Stravinsky to write a cham-ber orchestra work that would be

premiered in this room to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Stravinsky visited Dumbarton Oaks in 1937, before he started composing, and he is said to have been influenced in his design of the piece by the perfect layout of the Blisses’ elaborate formal gardens. When his publisher later asked him about the work, Stravinsky called it “a little concerto in the style of the Brandenburg Concertos.” Bach’s scores had already served as a general model for the violin concerto Stravinsky had composed six years earlier. Now they became a more direct source of inspiration. “I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto,” Stravinsky later recalled,

and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from

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

ComPoSed1937–March 29, 1938

FIrSt PerFormanCeMay 8, 1938; Dumbarton Oaks, outside Washington, D.C.

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeDecember 18, 1986, Orchestra hall. erich Leinsdorf conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeOctober 31, 2009, Orchestra hall. Sir Andrew Davis conducting

InStrumentatIonflute, e-flat clarinet, bassoon, two horns, strings


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the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do.

Bach’s spirit does hover over the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, although, despite the efforts of Stravinsky’s detractors at the time, no real case can be made for plagiarism or even affectionate imitation. (René Leibowitz publicly attacked Stravinsky’s “insolent bor-rowing” from Bach.) The essence of Stravinsky’s style in the 1930s (and the mark of his genius throughout his career) is the way he absorbed the music that influenced him—from circus marches to Beethoven’s symphonies—and made it his own. If the eighteenth century does seem to come alive in the pages of the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, it’s seen from the vantage point of some-one who also knew about Amelia Earhart, electric typewriters, color photographs, Pablo Picasso, and the Golden Gate Bridge. And it’s Bach’s vocabulary interpreted by someone who spoke the modern language of Pierrot lunaire, La mer, and, of course, The Rite of Spring.

Like most of Bach’s concertos, Stravinsky’s has three move-

ments, in the inevitable arrange-ment of two fast movements surrounding a slower one. (The movements follow each other without pause, linked by quiet chordal cadences.) Echoes of the Brandenburgs are everywhere, from the bustling figuration, spare sonor-ities, and textbook counterpoint to its concerto grosso–like textures, shifting back and forth from one group of musicians to another. But there isn’t a measure of this score that Bach would recognize, and, Stravinsky’s boasting to the con-trary, this has nothing to do with the neighborly borrowing that Bach and his contemporaries enjoyed on a regular basis. Stravinsky has rein-vented the baroque concerto from the ground up, and the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto is an object lesson in the distinction between superficial resemblance and deeper artistic ties. Throughout his career, Stravinsky was music’s greatest chameleon and a master of disguise. Perhaps that’s why, as the composer Alfredo Casella pointed out, the main theme of this second movement quotes Verdi’s Falstaff, who says that if he were to change his looks he would no longer be himself.

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Concerto for oboe d’amore in a major, BWV 1055

A great deal of Bach’s music survives, but, incredibly, there’s

much more that didn’t. Christoph Wolff, today’s finest Bach biog-rapher, speculates that over two hundred compositions from the Weimar years are lost, and that just 15 to 20 percent of Bach’s output from his subsequent time in Cöthen has survived. Two-fifths of the cantatas he wrote in Leipzig have never been found. The familiar Bach-Werke-Verzeichneis, a catalog that attaches a BWV number to each of Bach’s compositions, lists 1,120 works nonetheless, and the tally continues to grow as new scores are uncovered.

A very large portion of Bach’s orchestral music is lost; the existing twenty-some solo concertos, six Brandenburg Concertos, and four orchestral suites no doubt represent

just the tip of the iceberg. After Bach moved to Cöthen in 1717 and was no longer tied down with preparing music for weekly church services, he had the time to write many of what would become his best-known works. During his six years in Cöthen, he composed the six Brandenburg Concertos, the six suites for solo cello, much of the keyboard music we still play (the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the two-part inventions and three-part sinfonias, the English and French suites), miscellaneous sonatas and partitas, and more than a dozen concertos. That is a lifetime’s output all by itself, though for a composer whose complete catalog numbers in the four figures, it was probably just business as usual.

This concerto for oboe d’amore, the mezzo-soprano member of the

Johann Sebastian Bach

ComPoSeddate unknown


These are the CSO’s first subscription con-cert performances

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeJuly 31, 1986, ravinia Festival. heinz holliger, oboe; edo de Waart conducting

moSt reCent PerFormanCeAugust 28, 2000, ravinia Festival (as Clavier Concerto).Vladimir Feltsman conducting from the keyboard

InStrumentatIonsolo oboe d’amore, strings, harpsichord


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oboe family (and a particular favor-ite of Bach’s), has not survived in its original form, although it has been reconstructed with a fair degree of certainty from the arrangement Bach later made for harpsichord and orchestra. In fact, with the exception of the Fifth Brandenburg, all of Bach’s harpsichord concertos are believed to be transcriptions of scores conceived for other instru-ments. In some cases, we have both the original and the keyboard arrangement—which helps us understand how Bach got from one to the other—but for the A major concerto performed at these

concerts, only the later reworking has survived. By carefully studying the autograph score of the harp-sichord version, and by stripping Bach’s elaborate keyboard writing down to its pure melodic core, both the range and characteristics of the resulting solo line suggest that Bach had the oboe d’amore in mind. As usual, there are the three conventional movements—a magnificent aria in F-sharp minor bracketed by two spirited A major movements—and each is marked by the ingenuity and imagination that carry them far beyond convention, in detail and in overall design.

BaCH and StraVInSKY

The last music that igor Stravinsky played at the piano was the e-flat minor fugue from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. (his wife Vera left the score open to that page for months after his death.) During the last years of his life, Bach’s preludes and fugues were Stravinsky’s daily diet at the keyboard. in the spring of 1969, the frail composer—weighing just eighty-seven pounds in his eighty-seventh year—began to orchestrate four of them, but he never found the strength to finish.

Bach had long been Stravinsky’s constant com-panion in many ways, even though the great russian firebrand kept quiet about

his devotion to the straight-laced German master. he did admit that Bach’s two-part inventions were “somewhere in the remote back” of his mind when he composed his Octet and Piano Sonata, that his fondness for Bach’s two-violin concerto probably showed through in his own Violin Concerto, and that the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto was written in the spirit of the Brandenburgs. Only once, in his mid-fifties arrange-ment of Bach’s Christmas hymn, “Von himmel hoch,” did their names share equal billing on the cover of a score.

Stravinsky’s love for Bach was a life-long affair—a photo of igor in his childhood

room shows a portrait of Bach hanging on the wall behind him—and the earliest sign of his affection for the music of the distant past. “What incomparable instrumental writing is Bach’s,” Stravinsky said. “you can smell the resin in his violin parts, taste the reeds in the oboes.” it is this spirit—a love for the counterpoint of vivid, brilliant instrumental lines—that pervades the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and makes it a perfect companion and a logical successor to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, written some two hundred years before.

—P.H.

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

Concerto for two Violins in d minor, BWV 1043

This concerto is the only surviv-ing one by Bach for two solo

violins. The challenge of writing for two identical solo instruments is something later composers rejected in favor of a contrasting pair (Mozart’s well-known double con-certo, the Sinfonie concertante, is scored for violin and viola; Brahms chose the violin and cello). Baroque composers, however, loved symme-try, and Bach takes full advantage of having twin solos by writing lines that crisscross, mirror, echo each other, and toss phrases back and forth, like questions and answers.

One can hardly imagine two violinists fighting over these parts, for they are equally expres-sive, melodic, and demanding. What Bach writes for one violin he quickly offers the other, and the solo writing throughout the concerto becomes a model of subtle

negotiation and considerate give and take. In the middle movement, the second violin appears to be the leader, although the first violin temporarily gains the upper hand by coming in on a higher pitch.

There are three movements in the traditional fast-slow-fast pattern. The first and last are designed according to the ritornello prin-ciple, whereby music for the full ensemble recurs throughout, setting off the music for the soloists. The central slow movement is a spacious aria for two. The soloists behave like two friends who, eager to tell the same lovely story, keep inter-rupting each other, repeating one another’s favorite lines, and urging the tale seamlessly forward. They speak together only at the end.

Johann Sebastian Bach

ComPoSed1717–1723


FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeFebruary 3, 1893, Auditorium Theatre. Johann Marquardt, Franz esser, violins; Theodore Thomas conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeApril 5, 2009, Orchestra hall. robert Chen, violin; Pinchas Zukerman as soloist and conducting

InStrumentatIontwo solo violins, strings, harpsichord


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Harry Bicket Conductor Jennifer Koh Violin Jaime Laredo Violin