Program

Thursday, March 28, 2013, at 8:00Friday, March 29, 2013, at 1:30Saturday, March 30, 2013, at 8:00

mitsuko Uchida Conductor and Piano

music by Wolfgang mozart

Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major, K. 453AllegroAndanteAllegretto

MiTSuKo uChidA

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525AllegroRomance: AndanteMenuetto: AllegrettoRondo: Allegro

Robert Chen concertmaster

IntermIssIon

Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major, K. 595AllegroLarghettoAllegro

MiTSuKo uChidA

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

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

2

Piano Concerto no. 17 in g major, K. 453

Wolfgang mozartBorn January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria.Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria.

According to Mozart’s expense book, on May 27, 1784, he pur-

chased, for 34 Kreutzer, a pet star-ling that learned to whistle the first five measures of the finale of this concerto. Biographers sometimes confuse which came first, the bird or the tune, although since Mozart had already entered the concerto in his catalog on April 12, it seems clear that the music was finished by then and that it was Mozart who taught the tune to the starling and not the other way around.

Mozart’s pet was a member of the Sturnus vulgaris, the European starling that now thrives in this country as well. The starling is a virtuoso mimic—the American Scientist journal reported a star-ling repeating verbatim, after hearing it said just once, “Does Hammacher Schlemmer have a

toll-free number?”—and it has an uncanny ear for musical patterns. Mozart and his starling agreed on the seventeen-note theme for this concerto finale except that the bird always sang one note sharp and held another too long.

Mozart’s popularity with the Viennese concert public can be gauged from the number of piano concertos he wrote each year; 1784 was the peak year, with six new concertos. Those are the first works that Mozart entered in the catalog he started that February—a detailed listing, complete with date, instrumentation, and the opening bars of each new piece of music. Both the first entry, a piano concerto in E-flat (K. 449), and this G major concerto, the fifth item, were written not for Mozart’s own use, but for one of his most gifted

ComPosed1784; entered in catalog on April 12, 1874

FIrst PerFormanCeJune 13, 1874; döbling, a suburb of Vienna, Austria

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeMarch 4, 1937. dalies Frantz, piano; Frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeMay 31, 2011, orchestra hall. emanuel Ax, piano; Bernard haitink conducting

InstrUmentatIonsolo piano, one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, strings

CadenzasMozart

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme32 minutes

3

students, Barbara Ployer, often called Babette. Mozart said she paid him handsomely for it, though its value to musicians through the years can’t be rendered in common currency.

Barbara Ployer gave the first per-formance on June 13 at her family’s summer home in the Viennese suburb of Döbling, accompanied by an orchestra her father hired for the occasion. Mozart brought along as his guest the celebrated Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello, whose newest hit, The Barber of Seville, had already made Figaro an operatic sensation before either Mozart or Rossini got the chance. Mozart himself took the keyboard part in his Quintet in E-flat for piano and winds—the work that directly precedes the concerto in his catalog—and, as an added attraction, joined Miss Ployer in his two-piano sonata, K. 448. The evening was an upscale entertain-ment heightened by great music. In the way that Mozart managed better than nearly any composer at any time, this music touches both connoisseur and dilettante alike—it’s music of surpassing technical brilliance, but also, in Mozart’s own words, “written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”

The concerto is one of Mozart’s finest, evidence that, even at

the peak of his career as a virtuoso performer, he was as generous when writing for others as for himself. It was well received by the Ployers’ guests, and its success

quickly spread beyond the suburban enclave of Döbling. It’s one of only six of Mozart’s piano concertos which were published during his lifetime. Beethoven may well have picked up the unusual idea of a second theme that travels rapidly through several keys from the first movement of this concerto, since he does the same in his own piano concerto in this key. The entire opening Allegro, a particularly graceful rendering of the military march, is delicate in detail and bold in outline, with surprising dips into E-flat at important junctures.

Harmonic drama plays an even more influential role in the C major slow movement, where several powerful modulations and extensive chromaticism give weight to music of great transparency. This is music infinitely more complicated, more troubled than it at first seems. Even the opening statement from the piano swerves from major to minor, and from simple declamation to passionate outburst.

The finale is a set of variations on the tune the starling sang. The variations grow in complexity and ingenuity until the fourth, which plunges headlong into the minor mode, laden with chromati-cism. The final variation, almost a cadenza, leads straight to a comic-opera finale, the official coda. Surely Paisiello, whose talent seldom ventured beyond the opera house, marveled that Mozart could afford to waste on the piano concerto a ready-made opera finale more bril-liant than anything yet written for the stage. Mozart, of course, real-ized that the forms weren’t mutually

4

exclusive—the merger of the sym-phonic and the operatic styles is one of his greatest achievements—and that his well was far from dry—he was merely warming up for his own Figaro that, in just two years, would wipe Paisiello’s from the stage.

A postscript about the starling. The bird lived with his master

for three years (moving with the Mozarts first to the spacious apartment behind Saint Stephen’s Cathedral where The Marriage of Figaro was composed and later to cheaper quarters in the Landstrasse), witnessing the birth of Carl Thomas, the couple’s second son; Wolfgang’s bout with a severe kidney infec-tion; the historic night Haydn came to listen to string quartets dedicated to him; the birth, and death just a month later,

of a third son; and observing, day and night, the greatest composer of the time working at top form. The starling died on June 4, 1787, inspiring in Mozart an elegy that begins, “A little fool lies here / Whom I held dear . . . .” Mozart then bought a canary that he kept in his room until a few hours before his own death.

The Mozart Family. Painted by Johann Nepomuk della Croce, Salzburg, 1780–81

5

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525

First the title, as familiar as the music itself. It is best known in

English as A Little Night Music, the name Stephen Sondheim took for his Broadway adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Mozartean comic film, Smiles of a Summer Night. Mozart didn’t mean it as a lovely, evocative phrase—it was simply a convenient designation for an untitled work that he entered in his catalog as soon as it was finished, on August 10, 1787. The words literally mean “a short serenade” (Nachtmusik being the German equivalent of notturno, the common Italian designation). (In the same way, he would enter “eine kleine Klavier Sonata” and “eine kleine Marsch” the following year.)

Serenades are occasional works—party music for important social events. They were meant to be insignificant and disposable—it

was assumed that a serenade, like a great deal of music in the eigh-teenth century, would be performed only once—conditions that Mozart, for all his talents, could not fulfill. Mozart wrote many serenades for various combinations of instru-ments, particularly in his early days in Salzburg, and we wouldn’t want to be without any of them, for they find him at his most relaxed, and, at the same time, endlessly inven-tive. Like a major novelist who enjoys writing lighter works on the side, Mozart seemed to relish the challenge of making something first-rate of a second-class genre. He wrote fewer serenades once he moved to Vienna in 1781, especially as he grew more interested in sym-phonic form. Eine kleine Nachtmusik was his last serenade, and the only one he wrote for strings alone.

Wolfgang mozart

ComPosed1787; entered in catalog on August 10, 1787

FIrst PerFormanCeunknown

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeNovember 5, 1919, orchestra hall. Frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeMarch 14, 2000, orchestra hall. James Paul conducting

InstrUmentatIonstrings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme15 minutes

Cso reCordIngs1954. Fritz Reiner conduct-ing. RCA

A 1967 performance conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini is included on From the Archives, vol. 5.

6

Ironically, little is known about this work—perhaps the most

popular and familiar of all Mozart’s compositions. There’s no record of who asked Mozart to write it, or for what kind of occasion it was intended. Mozart doesn’t mention it in his correspondence, and if it weren’t for its near perfection as a work of art, we might suspect that

he gave it little thought—that for once, he really tossed off some music to be played in someone’s gar-den and then forgotten. But Eine kleine Nachtmusik is one of Mozart’s leanest and most brilliant creations—a score of truly

crystalline precision. It is written with painstaking care and concern, and with an impatience for the

commonplace phrase or harmonic progression that arises only when a composer is fully engaged in his work. Mozart was busy with the second act of Don Giovanni when he took time out for this serenade; perhaps his almost fierce dedica-tion to that score—one of his most adventuresome works—quite naturally spilled over into this little string serenade.

We know only that the work was written sometime during the summer of 1787, shortly after his father’s death. Mozart listed it in his catalog on August 10—just two entries and three months before Don Giovanni—indexing not just the four movements we now know, but also an additional minuet and trio after the opening Allegro. This fifth movement has not survived. Of the four that have, each could stand as a textbook example not only of technical mastery and for-mal clarity, but, more impressively, of how music apparently written by the rules demonstrates indi-viduality and originality in phrase after phrase.

Mozart’s father, Leopold. Anonymous oil portrait, ca. 1765

7

Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat major, K. 595

Mozart was the greatest pianist of his time, yet we have very

little idea of what it was like to be in the audience when he performed. We can hear Brahms playing his own music on record—the sound is faint and scratchy, but we can tell how he shaped a phrase, how he let a melody flow, how much give-and-take he allowed in the tempo—but no one can tell us how Mozart sounded. There are, of course, the stories of Mozart as a child performer: how he could sight-read, improvise, and play with a facility denied most musicians of any age; how he excelled at the stunts his father devised—playing with a cloth draped over the keys, for example—to amuse royalty. But once the child prodigy matured into a true genius—a more unset-tling commodity—and abandoned entertainment for art, it becomes

difficult to put our finger on precisely what set Mozart’s playing apart from all others.

The eyewitness reports are uniformly enthusiastic but short on facts. We don’t know how he looked when he sat at the keyboard—whether he leaped at the keys, as the movies suggest, with adolescent delight. There’s scarcely one comment as revealing as Mozart’s own about a colleague: “She stalks over the clavier with her long bony fingers in such an odd way.” There are other vivid remarks scattered throughout his letters about pianists who grimaced and flopped about while playing, or dis-torted the music with freewheeling use of rubato, and he once advised his sister to play with “plenty of expression, taste, and fire”—characteristics that apparently governed his own performances.

Wolfgang mozart

ComPosed1791; entered in catalog on January 5, 1791

FIrst PerFormanCeMarch 4, 1791, Vienna. The composer as soloist

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeFebruary 22, 1944, orchestra hall. Artur Schnabel, piano; hans Lange conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeMarch 20, 2010, orchestra hall. Mitsuko uchida conducting from the piano

InstrUmentatIonsolo piano, one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, strings

CadenzasMozart

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme31 minutes

8

Aloysia Weber Lange

There’s one particular phrase of his—“it should flow like oil”—that has helped musicians recognize

that discretely picking at Mozart’s notes is all wrong. But of technical mat-ters, there’s very little; on one occasion Mozart wrote to his father that “everyone is amazed that I can always keep strict time. What

the people cannot grasp is that in ‘tempo rubato’ in an adagio, the left hand should go on playing in strict time.” Few musicians whose opinions we might still value have left us detailed descriptions. Muzio Clementi, the famous pianist who was once pitted against Mozart in a contest, later recalled simply that he “had never heard anyone perform with such spirit and grace.” Mozart realized his concertizing was a digression, anticipating—as too few of his contemporaries did—the day when he would be known instead for the music he wrote. “I would rather neglect the piano than composition,” he told his father in February 1778, “for with me the piano is a sideline, though, thank God, a very good one.” Indeed, it was his best source of income for many years, and the neighbors regularly watched, sometimes as often as every other day, while his piano was lowered

from his window and carted off to his next engagement.

But by 1791, the last year of his life, Mozart was no longer in great demand as a performer, and he had virtually stopped writing music to play in concert. His own catalog tells the story: between February 1784 and December 1786 he entered twelve piano concertos, but there are none listed in 1787, just one in 1788, and one again in 1791. The B-flat major concerto from that final year is the last piece he played in public.

This concerto was entered in the catalog on January 5, 1791.

Mozart introduced it on March 4, at a concert organized by the clari-netist Joseph Bähr which included an appearance by Aloysia Weber Lange, who was Mozart’s first love, a former pupil, and now his sister-in-law. (Her husband painted the famous unfinished portrait of Mozart.) We don’t know how the work was received. Like two earlier piano concertos in B-flat, this last one is lyrical and intimate rather than grand or dramatic. Here Mozart seems to have found a new clarity that only heightens the expressive quality of the music. The writing has the directness of speech, the simplicity of folk song, and an emotional depth possible only in the greatest art. Though the music begins radiantly in B-flat major—with the accompaniment alone, as the G minor symphony (K. 440) does—Mozart frequently turns to the minor mode. The effect is, as in life itself, that sunlight brings shadow; we know joy only by expe-riencing sorrow as well.

9

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

The first two movements in particular understand the complex-ity of both life and art. Mozart’s mastery of detail and technique is so assured that the main theme of the Larghetto returns, little changed, as the second theme of the finale, without calling atten-tion to the fact. The finale is more cheerful, though not entirely care-free. The main theme is similar to the melody of “Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge,” a lovely song which is

listed immediately after the con-certo in Mozart’s own catalog:

Come, sweet May, and turnthe trees green again,and make the little violetsbloom for me by the brook.

But Mozart was to enjoy only one more springtime.

The use of still or video cameras and recording devices is prohibited in Orchestra Hall.

Latecomers will be seated during designated program pauses. PLease nOTe: some programs do not allow for latecomers to be seated in the hall.

Please use perfume, cologne, and all other scented products sparingly, as many patrons are sensitive to fragrance.

Please turn off or silence all personal electronic devices (pagers, watches, telephones, digital assistants).

Please note that symphony Center is a smoke-free environment.

Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

Note: Fire exits are located on all levels and are for emergency use only. The lighted exit sign nearest your seat is the shortest route outdoors. Please walk—do not run—to your exit and do not use elevators for emergency exit.Volunteer ushers provided by The Saints—Volunteers for the Performing Arts (www.saintschicago.org)

Symphony Center Information

© 2

013

Chi

cago

Sym

phon

y O

rche

stra