PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON

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

Friday, April 21, 2017, at 7:30Edman Memorial Chapel, Wheaton College

Neeme Järvi ConductorRobert Chen Violin

PärtFratres

ROBERT CHEN

BartókViolin Concerto No. 1Andante sostenutoAllegro giocoso

ROBERT CHEN

INTERMISSION

BeethovenSymphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral)Awakening of Happy Feelings on Arriving in the Country: Allegro ma non troppoScene by the Brook: Andante molto mossoMerry Gathering of Country Folk: Allegro—Thunderstorm: Allegro—Shepherd’s Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm: Allegretto

Presented in cooperation with Wheaton College and the Wheaton College Artist Series.

This performance is generously sponsored by the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation.

The appearance of Maestro Neeme Järvi is made possible by the Juli Plant Grainger Fund for Artistic Excellence.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Arvo PärtBorn September 11, 1935; Paide, Estonia

Fratres

Arvo Pärt stopped writing music in 1968. During the next eight years, after turning away from composing the dramatic twelve-tone works for which he was well known in his native Estonia, he began to study medieval music.

This self-imposed exile brought about one of the most remarkable stylistic changes a composer can undergo. When Pärt finally broke his silence in 1976, it was with a tiny, astonishingly spare piano piece, Für Alina, a quiet and unassuming score of extremely high and low notes, sounding like distant bells. (This music recalls Pärt’s childhood experiments on the family piano, a huge concert grand with a damaged middle register, which forced him to play only at the top and bottom of the keyboard.) “That was the first piece that was on a new plateau,” Pärt says. “It was here that I discovered the triad series, which I made my simple, little guiding rule.”

The music that has followed—and made him a cult figure—is austere and meditative, suffused with a stillness and a gentle strength that set it apart not only from Pärt’s earlier work (“It’s as if it’s by another person,” he says), but from almost any music ever written. Because he uses so few notes and so much repetition, in a largely tonal context, he often has been labeled a minimalist. But Pärt’s quiet, nuanced, and deeply emotional voice has little in common with the bracing urban sound world of such composers as Philip

Glass or Steve Reich. (“Am I really a mini-malist?” Pärt long ago asked, with customary detachment. “It’s not something that concerns me.”) Instead, Pärt has picked his own word, tintinnabuli, from the Latin for “bells,” to label his work.

Pärt has steadfastly refused to talk about his own music in detail. (“Franz Schubert explained nothing,” he once said. “He wrote songs. They are the best explaining.”) He admits few specific influences, although the death of Benjamin Britten late in 1976 affected him deeply at the time he was beginning to compose again. (“I had just discovered Britten for myself,” Pärt remem-bers. “Just before his death, I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music.”) His few, carefully chosen words about his own born-again simplicity are often quoted:

I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements, with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials—with the triad with one specific tonality.

Pärt made those comments in 1977, the year he composed two of his signature works, Tabula rasa, which, as its title suggests, was written on the blank slate of his newfound style, and the first in an extended family of pieces called Fratres (Brothers).

Pärt composed the original version of Fratres, scored for quintets of winds and strings, in

COMPOSED1977 (original version for quintets of winds and strings)

1992 (version for solo violin, strings, and percussion)

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo violin, strings, percussion

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME11 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMay 6, 7, and 8, 2004, Orchestra Hall. Yuan-Qing Yu as soloist, Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

Above: Pärt, by photographer Eric Marinitsch, with whom he has collaborated since the 1990s. Marinitsch’s collection of photographs and video of the composer, dating from 1997 to the present, was recently donated to the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, near Tallinn, Estonia. © Universal Edition / Eric Marinitsch

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1977, for the Estonian early music ensemble Hortus Musicus. On a commission from the Salzburg Festival, he wrote variations on this work for violin and piano in 1980. Fratres has remained a touchstone for Pärt; he has returned to it again and again, and he has continued to find new things in it. Fratres also represents a point of stability, a kind of musical home base, even as Pärt and his family immigrated, first to Vienna and then to Berlin. Like Bach’s Art of Fugue, Fratres has no single definitive instru- mentation. This is music of ideas rather than concrete sounds. But where Bach left the choice up to performers, Pärt has continued to prepare editions of the work for different combinations of players. His publisher currently offers six-teen different versions, arranged or authorized by Pärt. The one performed this week, scored

for solo violin, strings, and percussion, dates from 1992.

A ll the members of the Fratres family share the same essential elements: a low-lying open fifth is sustained like

a drone throughout the piece, while higher instruments play variations on an austere theme; the variations, which grow to a cli- max and then gradually recede, are separated by tiny episodes of single, percussive notes or chords, like the ticking of a clock or a heartbeat. In the version performed at these concerts, a solo violin begins the piece with a prelude of arpeggios and then offers soaring lines of commentary above the hymnlike theme. Sound eventually gives way to silence, but the music’s heartbeat continues.

Béla BartókBorn March 25, 1881; Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (now part of Romania)Died September 26, 1945; New York City

Violin Concerto No. 1

Above: Bartók, on his high school graduation in 1899

Bartók didn’t ever expect this work to be per-formed. But in 1958, almost thirteen years after his death and little more than a year after the death of a sixty-nine-year-old violinist named Stefi Geyer, it was played for the first time, and their

private concerto became public property.Stefi Geyer and Béla Bartók met in the spring

of 1907. He was twenty-six and a promising composer (he had not yet written any of the music for which he is famous today). She was nineteen, beautiful, and an unusually gifted violinist. They became friends at once, and quickly fell in love. Bartók’s letters to Geyer are as intimate and revealing as any he wrote, although they often dwell on the awkward—and fateful—schism between her devout Catholicism and his atheism.

Bartók jotted down the first eleven measures of this concerto on July 1, 1907, while spending time with the Geyer family in the Hungarian provinces. Later that same month, he set out on his first important trip collecting folk songs in Transylvania. (He wrote to Stefi about the women who were too shy and suspicious to sing into his portable Edison recorder.) That sum-mer, inspired by the discovery of a new world of music and the promise of their love, he began to compose this violin concerto for Stefi to play.

“This is your leitmotif,” he wrote to her in mid-September, notating the rising chain of thirds with which the concerto opens. And he discussed with her the ideas behind the two movements he was composing then, as well as a finale he had planned. But Bartók never wrote a third movement, and Geyer never played “her” concerto. On February 14, he received a letter from her breaking off their relationship. That same day, he began the thirteenth in a new set of bagatelles, a Lento funèbre subtitled “Elle est

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COMPOSEDJuly 1, 1907–February 5, 1908

FIRST PERFORMANCEopening movement: February 12, 1911; Budapest, Hungary

complete: May 30, 1958; Basel, Switzerland

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo violin, two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four

horns, three trumpets, two trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum, two harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME21 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 11, 1952, Orchestra Hall. Arthur Grumiaux as soloist, Rafael Kubelík conducting

August 3, 1961, Ravinia Festival. Isaac Stern as soloist, Izler Solomon conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJune 3, 4, 5, and 8, 2004, Orchestra Hall. Samuel Magad as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting

CSO RECORDING1983. Kyung-Wha Chung as soloist, Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

morte.” The next month, he composed a four-teenth bagatelle that’s an angry and grotesque waltz (inspiring Amy Lowell to write, in her poem “After Hearing a Waltz by Bartók”: My ears rack and throb with his cry, / And his eyes goggle under his hair, / As my fingers sink into the fair / White skin of his throat”).

Although for a while Bartók tried to interest other violinists in the two-movement concerto,

he soon decided to reuse the music in other pieces and to keep the concerto a secret (the orig-inal manuscript remained in Geyer’s possession until her death in December 1956). Recycling the concerto made musical sense, but it was less successful as therapy. In his last letter to Geyer, Bartók mentioned that he had begun a string quartet—the first in his landmark

series—that incorporated the theme of the concerto’s second movement. “This is my funeral dirge,” he wrote. In 1911, the concerto’s first movement, slightly revised and now anonymously entitled Portrait, was performed in Budapest. (It was published later that year as the first of Two Portraits, op. 5; the second is an orchestration of the fourteenth bagatelle.) And with that, the vio-lin concerto was effectively erased from Bartók’s output—it’s not listed among the composer’s

works in the catalog Zoltán Kodály prepared in 1921, nor in the official pamphlet compiled under Bartók’s supervision in 1939.

The two movements of this concerto reveal Bartók’s fondness at the time for contrasting pairs, as in the related Two Portraits or the Two Pictures, op. 10. Bartók characterized the first movement as the “idealized Stefi Geyer, celestial and inward,” and the second as a portrait of her “cheerful, witty, amusing” side. Geyer later said they pitted “the young girl whom he had loved” with “the violinist whom he had admired.” (His original idea for a third movement, never explored, was to portray the “indifferent, cool, and silent Stefi Geyer.”)

B artók himself said the first movement was “the most direct” music he had yet composed, “written exclusively from

the heart.” This is music of unrestrained pas-sion, laced with Stefi’s leitmotif of yearning. (Bartók’s biographer Halsey Stevens points out that Bartók’s manuscript is filled with unchar-acteristic markings like “with great sentiment,” that don’t appear in the published score.) At the beginning of the second movement, the orchestra underlines a short violin cadenza with the plan-gent harmony of Wagner’s Tristan chord, music’s most celebrated symbol of unfulfilled passion. (Tristan returns again later in the movement.) The concerto is the last of Bartók’s late-romantic scores—stamped with the originality of one of this century’s pioneers, but written in the lan-guage of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss, whom Bartók greatly admired.

One of the concerto’s puzzles remains unsolved. Near the end, a little songlike melody appears in quotation marks, dated “Jászberény,

Stefi Geyer in 1904—Bartók’s unrequited passion for her is reflected in much of his music of the period.

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Even by nineteenth- century standards, the historic concert on December 22, 1808, was something of an endur-ance test. That night, Beethoven conducted the premieres of both his Fifth and Sixth sympho-nies; played his Fourth

Piano Concerto (conducting from the keyboard); and rounded out the program with the Gloria and the Sanctus from the Mass in C, the concert aria Ah! perfido, improvisations at the keyboard, and the Choral Fantasy (written in great haste at the last moment as a grand finale).

If concertgoers that evening read their printed program—the luxury of program notes still many decades in the future—they would have found

the following brief guide to the Sixth Symphony, in Beethoven’s own words:

Pastoral Symphony, more an expression of feeling than painting. 1st piece: pleasant feelings which awaken in men on arriving in the countryside. 2d piece: scene by the brook. 3d piece: merry gathering of country people, interrupted by 4th piece: thunder and storm, into which breaks 5th piece: salutary feelings combined with thanks to the Deity.

Although Beethoven wasn’t by nature a man of words (spelling and punctuation led a perilous existence in his hands), he normally said what he meant. We must then take him at his word, believing that he had good reason (for the only time in his career) to preface his music with a few

Above: Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Wilibrord Mähler, 1804–05

1907 June 28.” What the tune is, or what hap-pened in Jászberény (Bartók’s home) only three days before he began to sketch his first violin concerto, we will probably never know.

Shortly after Stefi Geyer rejected him, Bartók became involved with Márta Ziegler, the first of his piano students to become his wife. (He married Ziegler in 1909 and divorced her in 1923, when he fell in love with his pupil Ditta Pásztory, whom he married that summer.) In 1920 Stefi Geyer moved to Switzerland, where she married Walter Schulthess, a composer and conductor. During the 1930s, when Bartók went to Basel to hear his music performed (he wrote the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta as well as the Divertimento for the Basel Chamber Orchestra), he and Geyer met several times and became friends again. But it was only after Geyer’s death in 1956 that their lost concerto came to light, suddenly conferring on Bartók’s other violin concerto the number two, and giving at last this fifty-year-old concerto the number and place in the repertory that Bartók had denied it.

Ludwig van BeethovenBorn December 16, 1770; Bonn, GermanyDied March 26, 1827; Vienna; Austria

Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral)

Bartók collecting folk songs and making field recordings in Darázs, Transylvania (now Drážovce, Slovakia), 1908

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well-chosen words and that curious disclaimer “more an expression of feeling than painting.” Perhaps Beethoven was anticipating the con-troversy to follow, for in 1808, symphonies weren’t supposed to depict postcard scenes or bad weather.

Beethoven’s idea itself was neither novel nor his own. In 1784 (Beethoven was only fourteen), an obscure composer named Justin Heinrich Knecht advertised his newest symphonic creation: Le portrait musical de la nature (A musical portrait of nature) in five movements, including a depiction of the peaceful countryside, the approach of a storm, and a general thanksgiving to the creator once the clouds had passed. It would take hear-ing no more than a measure or two of music to explain why Knecht has remained obscure while Beethoven turned the music world upside down. The descriptive writing and pastoral subject mat-ter of Beethoven’s symphony are a throwback to the baroque era—think of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or the Pastoral Symphony in Handel’s Messiah—or at least to Haydn’s two oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, the latter written only half a dozen years earlier.

History books are right, of course, to point out the work’s novelties: the “extra” movement, the descriptive titles, the programmatic element, and pictorial details like the birdcalls in the slow movement and the village band in the scherzo. But Beethoven was also right in trusting that “he who has ever had a notion of country life can imagine without too many descriptive words what the composer has intended.”

Our familiar picture of Beethoven, cross and deaf, slumped in total absorption over his sketches, doesn’t easily allow for Beethoven the

nature lover. But he liked nothing more than a walk in the woods, where he could wander undisturbed, stopping from time to time to scribble a new idea on the folded sheets of music paper he always carried in his pocket. “No one,” he wrote to Therese Malfatti two years after the premiere of the Pastoral Symphony, “can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.”

COMPOSED1807–08

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 22, 1808; Vienna, Austria. The composer conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME40 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 2 and 3, 1894, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

July 16, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Willem van Hoogstraten conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 25, 1998, Ravinia Festival. Edo de Waart conducting

May 16, 18, and 21, 2013, Orchestra Hall. Juanjo Mena conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1961. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1974. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

1988. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

Beethoven composing the Pastoral Symphony by a brook. Colored lithograph by Franz Hegi from the Zurich Music Society Almanac of 1834. Hans Conrad Bodmer Collection, Beethoven-Haus Bonn

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T hey’re all here in his Sixth Symphony. The most surprising thing about the opening Allegro is how quiet it is:

seldom in five hundred measures of music (well over ten minutes) does Beethoven raise his voice. Surely no composer—including the so-called minimalists—has so clearly understood the impact of repeating a simple idea unaltered, or slowing the rate of harmonic change to a stand-still. When, near the beginning of the develop-ment section, Beethoven changes the harmony only once in the course of fifty measures, the effect of that shift from B-flat to D is breath-taking. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this spacious, relaxed, blissfully untroubled movement is that it comes from the same pen that gave us—at the same time, no less—that firecracker of a symphony, his Fifth, in C minor.

Not even the critic Donald Tovey, despite his love for highbrow language, could find a better word to describe Beethoven’s slow movement than “lazy.” We can be sure that the laziness is intentional, and it’s amazing how much this least restful of composers seems to enjoy the drowsy pace, the endless dawdling over details, the self-indulgent repetitions of favorite sections, and the unchecked meandering through the byways of sonata form. Beethoven begins with a gentle babbling brook (one of those undulating accompaniment figures that Schubert would later do to perfection) and ends with notorious birdcalls. The only problem with the birds is that Beethoven calls so much attention to them,

bringing the music—and the brook—to a halt, and then specifying first the nightingale (flute), then the quail (oboe), and finally the cuckoo (clarinet). But as many a writer has pointed out, the birds are no more out of place here than a cadenza in a concerto—the nightingale even provides the final obligatory trill.

The third movement is dance music, with a plain, homely, rustic peasant dance for a midsec-tion trio. But the fun is cut short by dark clouds and the prospect of rain. There’s probably no more impressive storm in all music—the whole orchestra surges and shakes, trombones appear (for the first time) to emphasize the down-pour, and the timpani shows up just to add the thunder. This is, of course, no extra “movement” at all, but merely a lengthy, rapid introduction to the finale. The clouds finally roll away, the oboe promises better things to come in a wonderfully heartfelt phrase, and the flute, with its staccato scale, raises the curtain on Elysium. And so, to the yodeling of the clarinet and horn, we willingly believe F major to be the most beautiful key on earth. The moment is parallel to the great triumphant sunburst that marks the arrival of the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and, although the means could hardly be less similar, the effect is just as wondrous.

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

© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra