CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Ara Guzelimian, Provost and Dean, The Juilliard School.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor Emeritus
Frank Peter Zimmermann, Violin
Roxana Constantinescu, Mezzo-Soprano
Nicholas Phan, Tenor
Kyle Ketelsen, Bass-Baritone

JANÁČEK Sinfonietta
SZYMANOWSKI Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35

STRAVINSKY Pulcinella (complete)

Program Notes:

LEOS JANÁÈEK (1854–1928)
Sinfonietta

For every composer like Mendelssohn or Mozart, who begins to write significant and lasting works as a child, there are figures such as Bruckner or Janácek, who don’t hit their stride until late in life. Janácek certainly would not be known to us today had he, like Mozart, died at the age of 35. But, in his 60s he was unexpectedly inspired, and, after the success of his opera Jenùfa in 1916, he was instantly famous. For the next 12 years he wrote regularly, turning out one masterwork after another.

During the final decade of his life, Kamila Stösslová, 38 years younger than the composer and already married, contributed greatly to this creative flurry as his reluctant muse. From the time they met in the summer of 1917, Janáèek, despite his own marriage of some 35 years, wrote her a letter almost daily, declaring his passion and telling her about the music that now suddenly flowed from his pen. Kamila was polite but indifferent, but that hardly seems to have mattered to Janáèek. (And it apparently didn’t trouble his wife Zdenka at all, once she realized her husband loved a woman who would not return his affection.) Over the next 11 years, he wrote literally thousands of letters, and occasionally Kamila responded. At her insistence, he burned her replies, but he would usually wait until he received a new letter before destroying the previous one. In the last year of his life, Janáèek kept a separate diary about Kamila. That same year, he considered leaving his wife, as described in the Diary of One Who Disappeared, the song cycle he began the year he had met Kamila.

Kamila was the inspiration for most of Janáèek’s operatic heroines as well as his Second String Quartet, subtitled “Intimate Letters” (originally “Love Letters”), which tells their story in the passionate but ambiguous language of music. Kamila was with Janácek the day he got the idea for the Sinfonietta in 1926. They were sitting together in the park in the town of Pisek (where she lived with her husband, an antique dealer), listening to a band concert. Janáèek had recently received a commission to write a fanfare for a national festival of gymnastics in Prague, and, with the first sounds of this festive outdoor music that afternoon, he knew at once how to proceed. The idea of a brief fanfare quickly grew into the five-movement Sinfonietta, his largest purely orchestral work. Each movement is scored for a different—and unconventional—group of instruments; the sound of Janácek’s music is so idiosyncratic that for years unsympathetic listeners thought it was simply poorly orchestrated. But the raw, powerful, and often electrifying timbre is part of Janácek’s confident, utterly individual voice—matched by his unexpected choices of harmonies and the daring cut of his melodies.

The Sinfonietta opens with echoes of the gymnastics music: brilliant, athletic fanfares for trumpets, tubas, and timpani. These two minutes of music—repetitive and wildly dramatic, marked by brittle sonorities, short phrases, tough harmonies, and a stubborn but relentless move to the climax—are unique in the orchestral literature.

The second movement, scored for winds, four trombones, and strings, is characterized by Janáèek’s unusual combinations of instruments—high-flying melodies often soar over deep accompaniment figures, with nothing in between—and the unpredictable shift from one idea to another. Janáèek’s music has its own logic; if this movement were cut into pieces, one would struggle a long time to put the fragments back in a proper, satisfying sequence.

The atmospheric and richly detailed third movement covers a great variety of moods, from the solemn opening to ferocious brass outbursts. In rehearsals for the premiere, the principal flutist complained that the 32nd-note runs just before the end were unplayable. “Play what you like,” Janáèek replied, “but it must sound like the wind.”

The following movement is a set of variations on an insistent, unassuming theme that becomes increasingly fascinating in Janáèek’s hands. There are a number of splendid effects—the sudden ringing of a bell, for example, or the slow, benediction-like music that halts the flow near the end.

The finale begins simply enough, but through the ever-fresh changes of instrumentation, Janáèek creates a tension that is relieved only by the reappearance of the Sinfonietta’s opening fanfares, encircled now by eerie trills and climaxing in great, shimmering waves of sound.

Janáèek died two years after completing the Sinfonietta. He had gone to his cottage in the woods, where he was joined for the first time by Kamila and her 11-year-old son. One day the boy disappeared, and, while searching the woods, Janáèek caught a chill. The boy was found, but Janáèek came down with pneumonia and died within days. Seven years later Kamila died. Janáèek’s widow, Zdenka, outlived them both.


KAROL SZYMANOWSKI (1882–1937)
Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35

When the Polish violinist Pawe³ Kochañski first appeared with the Chicago Symphony in 1921, this Violin Concerto, which Karol Szymanowski had written for him five years before, was still unperformed. (Kochañski played Brahms here instead.) Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto was to have been premiered in St. Petersburg in February 1917, but war and revolution intervened. By the time the work was introduced in Warsaw in November 1922, Kochañski had immigrated to the US, and the solo was played by the concertmaster of the Warsaw Philharmonic instead.

“The sound is so magical that people here were completely transfixed,” Szymanowski wrote to Kochañski from Warsaw, obviously hoping he would still perform the work. “And just imagine, Pawelczek, the violin comes out on top the whole time!” Kochañski—now Paul, not Pawe³—did take up the piece, giving the American premiere in 1924 in Philadelphia under Leopold Stokowski and introducing it to the Chicago Symphony four years later, with Frederick Stock conducting. Oddly, although Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto (a second followed 17 years later, shortly before the composer’s death) was quickly acknowledged as a masterpiece, it still hasn’t received the attention of the other 20th-century landmarks in the form—works by Bartók, Stravinsky, and Berg, for example.

Born the year after Bartók, four months after Stravinsky, and two years before Berg, Szymanowski was Poland’s most adventuresome and gifted composer of the early 20th century. He enjoyed a childhood of privilege and culture. Of the five Szymanowski children, three became professional musicians. Jaros³aw Iwaszkiewicz, a poet who later worked on the libretto for Szymanowski’s opera King Roger, recalled fancy costume balls at the family home for which Karol and his brother Felix wrote music. Their sister Stasia became an opera singer and created the role of Roxana in King Roger. Karol started composing at the dawn of the new century, beginning with piano miniatures indebted to Chopin and quickly moving on to larger works for full orchestra. He studied formally in Warsaw, where he met Artur Rubinstein, who later played his music, and then in Berlin, where he helped found the Polish Composers’ Publishing Company, better known as “Young Poland in Music.”

Growing up in the seclusion of his father’s estate had not made Karol timid, self-absorbed, or provincial: he was influenced mostly by foreign composers such as Wagner, Strauss, Debussy, and Scriabin; he was fascinated by ancient Greece, the Orient, Norman Sicily, and the Arab world. As early as 1911, he wrote songs on lyrics by the Persian classic poet Hafiz (using the German translations by Hans Bethge, who provided the Chinese texts for Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde [The Song of the Earth], completed just two years earlier). Szymanowski’s Third Symphony, finished the year he wrote this violin concerto, sets poetry by the 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi. Szymanowski was well dressed and well traveled; in addition to the major European capitals, he visited North Africa in 1911 and again in 1914. He returned to Poland on the eve of World War I; exempted from military service because of a childhood injury, he now turned all his energies to composition. The war years, spent in isolation in a gardener’s hut on the family property, were his most productive.

Szymanowski’s musical language is one of synthesis—late Romanticism, sensuous chromaticism, delicate impressionism, and polytonality all play their part. He spent the summer of 1914 in Paris, and the sound world of Debussy and Ravel still lingers over the violin concerto he wrote two years later. He once recalled, “I shall never cease in the conviction [that] a true and deep understanding of French music, of its content, its form, and its further evolution, is one of the conditions for the development of our Polish music.” Over the years, Szymanowski’s style underwent a deeply personal evolution, leading him ultimately to embrace the ideas of Bartók and Stravinsky, and finally, near the end of his life, Polish folk music as well. Yet, throughout his career, his works sounded like no one else’s.

Szymanowski wrote several pieces for the violin, all composed for Kochañski, and in the process the two developed “a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin,” as he told Kochañski’s wife. “All other composers related to this style (no matter how much creative genius they revealed) came later, that is through the direct influence of Myths and the [First] Violin Concerto, or else through direct collaboration with Pawe³.” In a sense, Szymanowski and Kochañski were collaborators themselves, not just colleagues, and as a result, it’s fitting that the nearly two-minute cadenza near the end of this concerto was composed entirely by the violinist.

Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto was inspired by a poem by Tadeusz Miciñski, who had translated Rumi’s verses for the Third Symphony. The concerto doesn’t follow or duplicate the poem, yet Szymanowski’s ecstatic, sumptuous music is an ideal companion to Miciñski’s language:

All the birds pay tribute to me
for today I wed a goddess.
And now we stand by the lake in crimson blossom
in flowing tears of joy, with rapture and fear,
burning in amorous conflagration.

The design of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto is truly sui generis—it recalls no standard form and yet it is far from formless. Unlike the other prominent violin concertos of the 20th century—from Elgar’s, Bartók’s, Schoenberg’s and Berg’s to Elliott Carter’s and John Adams’s, all of which are divided into contrasting movements—Szymanowski’s is a single continuous expanse of constantly shifting tempos and moods. It never suggests the pattern of sonata—or any other textbook—form, and it bears no relation to the four-movements-in-one conceit that Schoenberg, for example, perfected early on.

Szymanowski calls for a large orchestra, but he uses it judiciously; the textures are often delicate and shimmering, the effect, no doubt of Szymanowski’s study of Debussy and Ravel. The orchestra begins, providing Miciñski’s “setting” of a forest filled with birds and fireflies; this is music of rich atmosphere and exoticism. The solo violin enters quietly, on a long-held high note, and as it weaves its ecstatic, flowing song, it rarely descends to safer altitudes. “The violin comes out on top the whole time,” was how Szymanowski put it, and the sustained, high-flying lyricism of this concerto is one of the hallmarks of the piece.

Szymanowski and Kochañski were reunited one last time, in 1933, to work together on a second violin concerto. Kochañski, then a member of the Juilliard faculty, was so eager to have a sequel to “his” violin concerto that he cut short his vacation to join Szymanowski in Poland. He gave the premiere of the new work in Warsaw that October. Kochañski died in New York in January 1934, three years before Szymanowski, his “dear and unforgettable friend.”


IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
Pulcinella


—Phillip Huscher

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Adapted from comments written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor Emeritus
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished 118-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 37 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 1947–1948; and Rafael Kubelík led the Orchestra for three seasons from 1950 to 1953.

The next 10 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.

On May 5, 2008, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association announced the appointment of Riccardo Muti as its tenth Music Director. Muti became Music Director Designate in January 2009, and he begins a five-year contract as Music Director in September 2010.

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.

Frank Peter Zimmermann, Violin
Frank Peter Zimmermann performs with all the major orchestras around the globe, collaborating with the world’s most renowned conductors. Recent and future highlights include engagements with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Bernard Haitink; the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with Sir Simon Rattle; the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, again with Haitink; the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnányi; the London Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Harding; the Philharmonia Orchestra, again with Dohnányi; and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Manfred Honeck.

Mr. Zimmermann has given the world premieres of Augusta Read Thomas’s Juggler in Paradise with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Andrey Boreyko; Brett Dean’s The Lost Art of Letter Writing with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the composer conducting; and Matthias Pintscher’s en sourdine with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Peter Eötvös.

An enthusiastic chamber musician and recitalist, Mr. Zimmermann’s performances are received with great critical acclaim from press and public alike. He also has performed throughout Europe in the Trio Zimmermann with violist Antoine Tamestit and cellist Christian Poltéra.

Mr. Zimmermann has recorded major concerto repertory from Bach to Weill, as well as many works from the recital repertory. Many of his recordings have won international awards and prizes. His awards include the Premio del Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena; the Rheinischer Kulturpreis; the Musikpreis of the city of Duisburg; and the Federal Cross of Merit, first class of the Federal Republic of Germany.

A native of Duisburg, Germany, Frank Peter Zimmermann started playing the violin when he was five years old, giving his first concert with orchestra at the age of 10. He subsequently studied with Valery Gradov, Saschko Gawriloff, and Herman Krebbers. He plays a Stradivarius from 1711, which once belonged to Fritz Kreisler, and which is kindly sponsored by the WestLB AG.

Roxana Constantinescu, Mezzo-Soprano

Nicholas Phan, Tenor
An accomplished recitalist and concert singer, this season, Nicholas Phan appears with Music of the Baroque in Hercules. He will be presented in recital by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (under the auspices of the Marilyn Horne Foundation), and the University of Chicago.

Last season Mr. Phan made his Carnegie Hall debut in a new piece commissioned by the University of Michigan Symphony. He also made debuts with Music of the Baroque, the San Diego Symphony, and the Oregon Symphony, and appeared with the New York Festival of Song at both the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. In recital he has been presented in New York by the Marilyn Horne Foundation in the annual On Wings of Song series.

In opera this season, Mr. Phan returns to the Atlanta Opera as Ramiro in La Cenerentola. He recently made his debut at the Opéra de Lille as Lindoro in The Italian Girl in Algiers and at the Ravinia Festival as Pedrillo in The Abduction from the Seraglio. Other notable debuts include the New York City Opera as Damon in Acis and Galatea, the Los Angeles Opera in The Coronation of Poppea, the Chicago Opera Theater in The Return of Ulysses, Arizona Opera as Lindoro, Atlanta Opera in Pagliacci, and in Europe as Don Polidoro in La finta semplice directed by Christoph Loy at the Frankfurt Opera.

A graduate of the Houston Grand Opera Studio,Mr. Phan appeared in many productions there including the world premieres of Daniel Catán’s Salsipuedes and Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata. He made his professional operatic debut with Glimmerglass Opera as a member of its Young American Artist Program.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Nicholas Phan also studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Aspen Music Festival and School. He was the recipient of a 2006 Sullivan Foundation Award and a 2004 Richard F. Gold Career Grant from the Shoshana Foundation.

Kyle Ketelsen, Bass-Baritone
American bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen is in regular demand by the world’s leading opera companies and orchestras. He began the current season at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden as Leporello in Don Giovanni conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, followed by a return to the Gran Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona in the title role of The Marriage of Figaro. Other opera engagements this season include Faust with the Minnesota Opera and his debut at De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam in Carmen conducted by Mariss Jansons. Concert engagements include appearances with the Philharmonia Orchestra in Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex under Esa-Pekka Salonen, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella with the Chicago Symphony under Pierre Boulez at Carnegie Hall, Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra under David Zinman, and Verdi’s Requiem with the Madison Symphony.

Mr. Ketelsen has won great critical acclaim for his portrayals with the major American theaters. He made his Lyric Opera of Chicago debut as Masetto in a new production of Don Giovanni conducted by Christoph Eschenbach and directed by Peter Stein. In recent seasons he has sung Mozart’s Figaro for his New York City Opera debut and at Opera Pacific; Leporello with Glimmerglass Opera and Michigan Opera Theatre; Escamillo with Washington National Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Michigan Opera Theatre, the Teatro Real in Madrid, and Orlando Opera; and his debut performances of Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust with Michigan Opera Theatre. He has also sung Colline in La bohème with Opera Pacific, Michigan Opera Theatre, and in Saint Louis. Other repertory includes Basilio in The Barber of Seville and Ferrando in Il trovatore.

A native of Clinton, Iowa, Kyle Ketelsen received an undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa, where he studied with Albert Gammon, and did graduate work at Indiana University, where he studied with Giorgio Tozzi.