CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, Principal Conductor
Kelley O'Connor, Mezzo-Soprano

RAVEL Menuet antique
PETER LIEBERSON Neruda Songs
MAHLER Symphony No. 1, "Titan"

The Trustees of Carnegie Hall gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Debs in support of the 2007-2008 season.

Program Notes:

By Philip Huscher

MAURICE RAVEL Menuet antique
Born March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France; died December 28, 1937, in Paris.

Composed for solo piano in 1895, the Menuet antique received its first performance on April 18, 1898, with Ricardo Viñes. Ravel made an orchestral version in 1929 and conducted the first performance on January 11, 1930; the Carnegie Hall premiere of the orchestrated version took place on October 22, 1931, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Erich Kleiber.

Scoring: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, and strings.

This is Ravel’s first published work, and like many of his bigger and better-known compositions, it began life as a piece for solo piano before it was transformed into an orchestral showpiece. In no case was the gap between original and transcription greater—more than three decades in this case. In fact, this was the last orchestration Ravel made of one of his piano works, and it was completed and premiered, under his baton, just after Boléro, his late-career blockbuster hit.

The Menuet antique is Ravel’s first essay in revitalizing an old dance form, an exercise that eventually produced some of his most memorable music, including Le tombeau de Couperin. This early minuet evokes two kinds of musical memory. The archly stylized opening, with its faux grandeur, recaptures the period details of an earlier time. In the central episode, however, Ravel achieves a more subtle and personal evocation of the past, almost Proustian in the richness and intimacy of his remembrance. Although the early piano piece is slight and unassuming, Ravel’s loving and sophisticated orchestration, made at the height of his career, illustrates Proust’s own words about looking back on one’s youth with a tolerant eye: “We must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived.”


PETER LIEBERSON Neruda Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra
Born October 25, 1946, in New York City.

Co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and completed in April 2005, the Neruda Songs received their first performance on May 20 of that year with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, for whom the songs were written, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen; th songs received their New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on October 25, 2005, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Levine.

Scoring: 2 flutes, piccolo, oboe, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, percussion (low tom-tom, surdo [Brazilian snare drum], crotales, glockenspiel, maracas, suspended cymbal, vibraphone), harp, piano, and strings.

Peter Lieberson chanced upon the love sonnets by Pablo Neruda at the Albuquerque airport gift shop. He was struck at first by the paperback’s bright pink cover, peppered with orange dots. Then, as he glanced through the poems, he immediately knew he would set some of them to music for the woman who would soon become his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt.

The Neruda Songs, the five songs Lieberson eventually composed, have already led an extraordinary existence. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang them first with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2005, and then with the Boston Symphony in a handful of cities, including Chicago, the following year. (Bernard Haitink, who was in the Chicago audience, quickly made plans to program them with the CSO.) In a devastating twist of fate, they became her swan song: the beloved American mezzo-soprano died of cancer in July 2006. A CD of the songs, recorded live in Boston and released shortly after her death, topped critics’ year-end lists and won a huge following (and eventually a 2008 Grammy Award). This past December, the Neruda Songs earned the 2008 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, music’s most prestigious and lucrative award. “The piece has beauty and surface simplicity, but great emotional depth and intellectual rigor as well,” Marc Satterwhite, the director of the Grawemeyer program, said.

“I always saw music as a means of expression of some kind, and not purely as an intellectual exercise,” Lieberson said after winning the award. “But at the time in which I grew up as a composer, there was a great deal of emphasis on intellectual comprehension of the structure of music, the possibilities of logic in music.” The Neruda Songs are the most powerful reflection of Lieberson’s belief in music that is guided by intuition, spontaneity, and matters of the heart, rather than academic conceptual ideas.

Lieberson enjoyed a composer’s dream childhood. His father was Goddard Lieberson, the revered president of Columbia Records, who had persuaded the company to record the complete works of Schoenberg and Webern, as well as the entire Stravinsky catalog under the composer’s supervision. His mother was ballerina Vera Zorina, once a principal dancer in the Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo, and the former wife of George Balanchine. Stravinsky was a regular Thanksgiving dinner guest; Rudolf Serkin and Leonard Bernstein were family friends. But young Peter had no interest in making music his career.

Lieberson was, however, listening to late Stravinsky, and to jazz and Broadway musicals (he went to the premiere of The Sound of Music; he heard snatches of My Fair Lady around the house because his father was the person who convinced CBS to invest in it). Suddenly, and unexpectedly, at the age of 22, he wanted to write music. When his father took him to give Stravinsky the news, the great composer said, “It is not enough to want. You must be.” First Lieberson began to study, casually and informally, with Milton Babbitt. (“We would meet in Chinese restaurants,” Lieberson remembers, “and talk about my pieces.”) Later he studied, in a more conventional fashion, with Charles Wuorinen at Columbia University.

Then in 1976, at the age of 30, Lieberson announced that he was giving up music and moving to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to study with Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master. Within a matter of months, Lieberson was composing again, but obviously he had turned an important corner in his life—and in his music. After two years, he moved back to the East Coast to direct a meditation and cultural program in Boston and to begin doctoral studies in composition at Brandeis. Before he had completed his degree, he received a commission for his first orchestral score from the Boston Symphony Orchestra: Lieberson’s Piano Concerto was premiered in 1983 by his childhood friend, Peter Serkin, to great acclaim. By 1994, he had become a full-time composer.

It was during rehearsals for the world premiere of his opera Ashoka’s Dream at the Santa Fe Opera in 1997 that Lieberson met Lorraine Hunt, who was singing the role of Triraksha. Lieberson found in her not only a soul mate, but someone whose deeply intuitive musicianship would inspire him to write ever more personal music—he had never before known a singer “so unafraid of her emotions, so able to access those emotions and express them,” as he later recalled. “There was no artifice.” When he heard her as Triraksha, he was struck, as if for the first time, by “the power of the melodic line”—a jolt to his sensibilities that would find its ultimate release in the sensual lyricism of the Neruda Songs. The two married only days before Lorraine arrived in Chicago to make her debut with the Orchestra in the premiere of John Harbison’s Four Psalms in April 1999.

The first music Peter wrote for Lorraine to sing was a setting of five poems by Rilke for voice and piano, completed in 2001 (she sang them at Ravinia with Peter Serkin in 2004, a performance that was released on CD). After Esa-Pekka Salonen asked him to compose a concerto for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Peter countered with the idea of another song cycle. That was when he returned to the pink paperback. It took him nearly a year to choose from the 100 sonnets the Chilean poet Neruda had written for Matilde Urrutia, his beloved partner. Lorraine, whose Spanish was fluent, would read them to him, allowing them both the chance to know the sonnets better and to pick more wisely. The first weeding still left him with 40 poems; he finally whittled those down to just eight, and then as he began to work, he realized that even that was too many. As with his Rilke cycle, he settled on five. (“Out of a hundred sonnets—how could we ever begin to choose?” Lorraine wrote in her diary at the time. “But Peter does choose, perfectly and beautifully.”) The arc of those five sonnets traces love from sheer infatuation to death and parting—an almost unbearably heartbreaking destination, under the circumstances.

At the time of the premiere, the composer commented on his choices:

Each of the five poems that I set to music seemed to me to reflect a different face in love’s mirror. The first poem, “If your eyes were not the color of the moon,” is pure appreciation of the beloved. The second, “Love, love, the clouds went up the tower of the sky like triumphant washerwomen,” is joyful and also mysterious in its evocation of nature’s elements: fire, water, wind, and luminous space. The third poem, “Don’t go far off, not even for a day,” reflects the anguish of love, the fear and pain of separation. The fourth poem, “And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream,” is complex in its emotional tone. First there is the exultance of passion. Then, gentle, soothing words lead the beloved into the world of rest, sleep and dream. Finally, the fifth poem, “My love, if I die and you don’t,” is very sad and peaceful at the same time. There is the recognition that no matter how blessed one is with love, there will be a time when we must part from those whom we cherish so much. Still, Neruda reminds one that love has not ended. In truth there is no real death to love nor even a birth: “It is like a long river, only changing lands, and changing lips.”

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died little more than a year after she sang the Neruda Songs for the first time. This music began as a set of love songs from the composer to his wife—“Although these poems were written to another, when I set them I was speaking directly to my own beloved, Lorraine,” Peter wrote at the time—but they have taken on a life of their own. They have already outgrown their roots as private confessions—so inward and so naked emotionally as to make listening sometimes seem almost an intrusion—to become public works of art. As Young American mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor becomes the first artist to sing them since Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s death, the Neruda Songs leave behind their incalculable role as a memorial to a very great singer and take their place in the select circle of enduring music for voice and orchestra.


Copyright © 2008 by The Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, Principal Conductor
With an international conducting career that has spanned more than five decades, Amsterdam-born Bernard Haitink is one of today’s most celebrated conductors.

Appointed principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2006, Mr. Haitink has led many of the world’s major orchestras, including more than 25 years at the helm of the Royal Concertgebouw as its music director. In addition, he previously has held posts as music director of the Dresden Staatskapelle; the Royal Opera, Covent Garden; Glyndebourne Festival Opera; and the London Philharmonic. He is conductor laureate of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor emeritus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has made frequent guest appearances with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Vienna Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio, London Symphony, and other leading orchestras.

The 2007–2008 season began with a tour with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to The Proms and the Salzburg, Berlin, and Lucerne festivals. In December, Mr. Haitink returned to Covent Garden for performances of Parsifal. At the 2008 Lucerne Easter Festival, he begins a cycle of all Beethoven’s symphonies, concertos, and overtures with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; the cycle will be completed during the summer 2008 and 2009 Lucerne Easter festivals. Other highlights of the season include his first St. Matthew Passion with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Haitink has recorded widely for the Phillips, Decca, and EMI labels, including complete cycles of the symphonies by Mahler, Bruckner, and Schumann with the Concertgebouw and extensive repertory with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony. His most recent recordings are the complete symphonies by Brahms and Beethoven with the London Symphony Orchestra on the LSO Live label. His discography also includes many opera recordings with the Royal Opera and Glyndebourne, as well as with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle. With the CSO, he has recorded Mahler’s Third and Sixth symphonies and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony on the CSO Resound label.

Bernard Haitink has received many international awards in recognition of his services to music, including an honorary knighthood and the Companion of Honour in the United Kingdom, and the House Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands. He was named Musical America’s Musician of the Year for 2007.


The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished 117-year history began in 1891 when Theodore Thomas, then the leading conductor in America and a recognized music pioneer, was invited by Charles Norman Fay to establish a symphony orchestra in Chicago. Thomas served as music director for 13 years until his death in 1905—just three weeks after the dedication of Orchestra Hall, the Chicago Orchestra’s permanent home.

Thomas’s successor was Frederick Stock, who began his career in the viola section in 1895 and became assistant conductor four years later. His tenure at the Orchestra’s helm lasted thirty-seven years, from 1905 to 1942. Three distinguished conductors headed the Orchestra during the following decade: Désiré Defauw was music director from 1943 to 1947; Artur Rodzinski assumed the post in 1947–48; and Rafael Kubelík led the Orchestra for three seasons from 1950 to 1953.

The next ten years belonged to Fritz Reiner, whose recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are still considered performance hallmarks. For the five seasons from 1963 to 1968, Jean Martinon held the position of music director.

Sir Georg Solti, the Orchestra’s eighth music director, served from 1969 until 1991. He held the title of music director laureate and returned to conduct the Orchestra for several weeks each season until his death in September 1997.

In January 1989, the CSO began a new collaboration with Daniel Barenboim as he was named music director designate. Mr. Barenboim assumed leadership as the Orchestra’s ninth music director in September 1991, a position he held until June 2006.

Two of the world’s most celebrated conductors assumed titled positions with the Chicago Symphony beginning with the 2006–2007 season. Eminent Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink became the Orchestra’s new principal conductor, and French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez—the CSO’s Helen Regenstein Principal Guest Conductor since 1995—became the Orchestra’s conductor emeritus.

Kelley O'Connor, Mezzo-Soprano
Grammy Award–winning mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor has emerged as one of the most compelling performers of her generation. This season, her calendar includes Dvořák’s Moravian Duets with Iván Fischer and the National Symphony Orchestra, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Jiří Bĕlohlávek and the Dallas Symphony, Handel’s Messiah with Norman Mackenzie and the Atlanta Symphony, Haydn’s Mass in the Time of War with Bernard Labadie and the San Francisco Symphony, Stravinsky’s Les noces with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Falstaff at the Santa Fe Opera.

Ms. O’Connor has received international acclaim as Federico García Lorca in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar. She created the role for the world premiere at Tanglewood under the baton of Robert Spano and subsequently joined Miguel Harth-Bedoya for performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Hall. In 2005, she reprised her portrayal of Lorca in the world premiere of the revised edition of Ainadamar at the Santa Fe Opera in a new staging by Peter Sellars, which also was presented at Lincoln Center. For her debut with the Atlanta Symphony, in Ainadamar, she joined Robert Spano for performances and a Deutsche Grammophon recording; she rejoined Spano and Atlanta in summer 2006 for additional performances of Ainadamar, including her debuts at the Ojai and Ravinia festivals. This season, O’Connor sings Lorca in Ainadamar at Opera Boston, the Adelaide Festival of Arts, and at the Barbican Centre, in addition to her performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Highlights of past seasons include Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges with Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic; Mozart’s Requiem with Louis Langrée and the Baltimore Symphony; Brahms’s Songs for Alto, Viola, and Piano with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society; and Berio’s Laborintus II with Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

A native of California, Kelley O’Connor holds a bachelor of music degree from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree from UCLA, where she studied with Nina Hinson. In 2006, she was recognized by Opera Now on its annual list of Young Artists: Who’s Hot?