Program

Thursday, April 10, 2014, at 8:00Friday, April 11, 2014, at 8:00Saturday, April 12, 2014, at 8:00Sunday, April 13, 2014, at 3:00

Esa-Pekka Salonen ConductorChristian Tetzlaff Violin

JanáčekOverture to From the House of the DeadFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances

DvořákViolin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 53Allegro, ma non troppoAdagio, ma non troppoFinale: Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo

ChriSTiAn TeTzlAFF

InTErmISSIon

SalonenNyxFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

JanáčekSinfoniettaAllegrettoAndante—AllegrettoModeratoAllegrettoAllegro

Global Sponsor of the CSO

One hundred TwenTy-Third SeASOn

Chicago Symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music director Pierre Boulez helen regenstein Conductor emeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant

The appearance of Christian Tetzlaff is made possible with generous gifts from Daniel R. Murray and the John Ward Seabury Distinguished Soloist Fund.

This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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CommEnTS by Phillip huscher

leoš JanáčekBorn July 3, 1854, Hukvaldy, Moravia.Died August 12, 1928, Moravská Ostrava, Czechoslovakia.

overture to From the House of the Dead

ComPoSED1927–28

FIrST PErFormanCEApril 12, 1930; Brno, Czechoslovakia

FIrST CSo PErFormanCEJuly 9, 1993, ravinia Festival. libor Pešek conducting

These are the fi rst Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances.

InSTrUmEnTaTIonfour fl utes and two piccolos, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets and bass trumpet, three trombones, tenor tuba and bass tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

aPProXImaTE PErFormanCE TImE6 minutes

“Th at black opera of mine is giving me plenty of work,” Janáček wrote to his muse Kamila Stösslová in November 1927. He was seventy-four; From the House of the Dead would be his last opera. “It seems to me as if in it I

am gradually descending lower and lower, right to the depths of the most wretched people of humanity. And it is hard going.”

Janáček began sketching the opera in February 1927. Act 3 was on his desk when he died in August 1928, awaiting nothing more than the occasional touch-up. Instead of a libretto, he referred to lists of characters and incidents, with page references to Dostoyevsky’s Th e House of the Dead, on which the new piece was based. (He translated from Russian into Czech as he went.) It was an unconventional way of working on an opera, but then, From the House of the Dead is a highly unconventional opera—totally freed from the traditions of the form, it is essentially a work that creates its own kind of music theater.

Tolstoy regarded Th e House of the Dead as Dostoyevsky’s fi nest work. “I do not know a book better than this in all our literature, not even excepting Pushkin,” he wrote in 1880. Dostoyevsky wrote his novel, a fi ctionalized

memoir of his four years in a Siberian prison camp, in 1860. (When Dostoyevsky entered prison in 1850, at the age of twenty-eight, he was already a published novelist. Forbidden to write in prison, he started making notes, the source of the novel itself, during a stay in the prison hospital.) Like the opera Janáček made from its pages, Th e House of the Dead is populated by scores of characters, some of whom step forward only once and are not heard from again. Janáček was particularly attracted to the idea of creating an opera without traditional leading roles.

Th e overture to the opera was written last, although much of its material comes from a violin concerto Janáček began in 1926 and eventually left unfi nished in order to compose the Glagolitic Mass. Janáček originally titled the concerto Soul and then later Th e Pilgrimage of a Little Soul. (It was reconstructed and fi rst performed in 1988.) Th e overture itself is linked thematically to the opera—the powerful opening theme recurs in act 1, for example—but also betrays its origins with its extensive music for solo violin. Like the opera it introduces, the overture inhabits a strange, haunting world all its own, with little regard for convention—from moment to moment, it suggests bits and pieces of a concerto, a tone poem, a fanfare—or traditional picturesque scene setting. At the head of the score, Janáček quotes Dostoyevsky: “In every creature a spark of God.”

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antonín DvořákBorn September 8, 1841, Mühlhausen, Bohemia (now Nelahozeves, Czech Republic).Died May 1, 1904, Prague.

Violin Concerto in a minor, op. 53

ComPoSED1879, revised 1880

FIrST PErFormanCEOctober 14, 1883

FIrST CSo PErFormanCESOctober 30 & 31, 1891, Auditorium Theatre. Max Bendix as soloist, Theodore Thomas conducting (u.S. premiere)

moST rECEnT CSo PErFormanCESJune 4, 5 & 6, 2009, Orchestra hall. Janine Jansen as soloist, Sir Mark elder conducting

InSTrUmEnTaTIonsolo violin, two fl utes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

aPProXImaTE PErFormanCE TImE31 minutes

Th e year the Chicago Symphony was founded, the Orchestra gave the American premiere of an important new work during its third week of concerts. Th e program book for October 30, 1891 (exactly fourteen days after the Orchestra’s

inaugural concert), lists Dvořák’s Violin Concerto as “new,” and the program annotator, like anyone writing about contemporary music, hedged his bets on Dvořák’s future reputation. Of the Bohemian composer’s recent decision to relocate to the United States, a new world he would later famously depict in a symphony, he said only, “it remains to be seen to what extent the infl uences of another civilization may aff ect his musical expression.”

Dvořák was hardly unknown at the time, even if he hadn’t yet written some of the works on which his reputation rests today, including the New World Symphony and the Cello Concerto. In fact, Th eodore Th omas, the Chicago Symphony’s founder and fi rst music director, picked Dvořák’s Husitská Overture as the fi nal work on the Orchestra’s very fi rst concert. And later that season, Th omas programmed more Dvořák: the Scherzo capriccioso, one of the Slavonic Rhapsodies, and the D major symphony (no. 6, but then known as no. 1) that was composed the same year as the violin concerto. Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, little more than a decade old when the Chicago Symphony introduced it, is the second

of the composer’s three concertos, following one for piano written in 1876 and preceding the great cello concerto by some fi fteen years.

D vořák had learned to play the violin as a small boy, and he also composed marches and waltzes for the village

band. In Zlonice, he studied piano, organ, and viola, eventually becoming a decent enough violist to earn a living as an orchestra musician when he couldn’t make any money from his compositions. After he moved to Prague in 1857, he became principal viola in the orchestra for the new Provisional Th eater (later the National Th eater). For the rest of his life, he treasured the memory of playing a concert there in 1863 under his idol, Richard Wagner, that included the overture to Tannhäuser, the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, and excerpts from Die Meistersinger and Die Walküre. In 1871, Dvořák left the orchestra to devote more time to composition, but he soon realized that he would have to teach to get by. For many years, his father doubted the wisdom of his son’s choice of music over the life of a butcher, the family business.

Th en in 1873, Dvořák’s works began to attract attention. Th e successful premiere of his patriotic cantata Heirs of the White Mountain on March 9 launched his fame in his homeland. Later that year, he married Anna Cermáková, the sister of the Prague actress Josefi na, who had, nearly a decade before, rebuff ed his advances. (Like Mozart and Haydn, he married not his fi rst love, but her sister.) In 1874, Dvořák took stock of his situation: he had begun to taste success; his wife

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was pregnant with their first child; and he looked forward to the pleasures, comforts, and traditions of family life. But he craved recognition and he needed money. In July, he entered fifteen of his newest works in a competition for the Austrian State Music Prize, a government award designed to assist struggling young artists. The judges were Johann Herbeck, the director of the Imperial

Opera in Vienna; Eduard Hanslick, a man of famous, often caustic, opin-ions and one of the most influential critics of the nineteenth century; and, sitting on the panel for the first time, Johannes Brahms, the biggest name in Viennese music. Dvořák won the first

prize of four hundred gulden, and he felt a kind of encouragement and validation that money can’t buy. The citation praised his “genuine and original gifts,” and noted, not unfairly, that he possessed “an undoubted talent, but in a way which as yet remains formless and unbridled.” (He competed and won again the next three years in a row.)

I t was Brahms who introduced Dvořák to violinist-composer-conductor Joseph Joachim, who encouraged Dvořák to write

a violin concerto. Joachim gave the premiere of Brahms’s Violin Concerto on the first day of 1879, shortly before Dvořák started to com-pose his; it was a banner year for violinists. When Dvořák sent Joachim the manuscript of his new score that November, the violinist

mailed back pages of suggested improvements, and by May 9, 1880, Dvořák told his pub-lisher that he had redone the entire concerto accordingly, “without missing a single mea-sure.” Joachim made still further changes to his solo part—“Although the work proves that you know the violin well,” he wrote, “certain details make it clear that you have not played it yourself for some time”—and then arranged for a run-through in Berlin in November 1882. But he never played the concerto in public; the premiere was given nearly a year later in Prague by František Ondříček. (Plans for Joachim to perform it in London in 1884 fell through.)

I t’s clear from the powerhouse opening of this work that Dvořák knew and admired Brahms’s new violin concerto. (Brahms later

returned the compliment: after hearing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, he is reported to have said, “Why on earth didn’t I know that one could write a cello concerto like this? Had I known, I would have written one long ago.”) The entire first movement is serious and dramatic, and, for all its richness of color and harmony, it’s still classical in formal outline. A short cadenza leads the way to the spacious, gloriously lyrical Adagio, nearly as long as the symphonically scaled first movement. The sparkling finale is one of the composer’s best, and the proudly Czech turn of its themes and syncopated rhythms suggest that, for all his fascination with America, Dvořák was still something of an “old world” composer.

A postscript. Since introducing Dvořák’s Violin Concerto to America, the Chicago Symphony has given the

U.S. premieres of more than three hundred works, including Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Dukas, Elgar’s Enigma Variations, four tone poems by Strauss (Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and Ein Heldenleben), Sibelius’s Second Symphony, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, Holst’s The Planets, Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto, Boulez’s Livre pour cordes, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Insomnia, and, most recently, Thea Musgrave’s Autumn Sonata.

Violinist Joseph Joachim encouraged Dvořák to write a violin concerto

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Esa-Pekka SalonenBorn June 30, 1958, Helsinki, Finland.

Nyx

Last month, Esa-Pekka Salonen was awarded the prestigious Nemmers Prize in Music Composition by the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, a biennial award given to the most accomplished names in music today

(previous winners include John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, and, most recently, Aaron Jay Kernis). Th e honor will bring him into close contact with Northwestern students and faculty over the next two years, as well as heightening his relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which, as Salonen pointed out in his acceptance remarks, “has long been a musical home away from home for me.”

Although Salonen fi rst appeared as a con-ductor with the Chicago Symphony in 1988, he led a work of his in Chicago for the fi rst time in April of 2003, when he gave the U.S. premiere of Insomnia, a dark and turbulent nocturne he had composed the year before. (Th e CSO had been introduced to Salonen’s music when it played his LA Variations under Christoph Eschenbach at Ravinia the previous summer. In Orchestra Hall, the Orchestra played this pivotal work under Alan Gilbert in 2006.) In recent years, Salonen has conducted two large-scale concertos in Chicago—both of them played here by their original performers, Yefi m Bronfman, who performed the Piano

Concerto with the CSO in April 2008, and Leila Josefowicz, the soloist in the Violin Concerto in February 2011. Unusually, the Violin Concerto was commissioned by two orchestras—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Salonen was music director from 1992 to 2009, and the Chicago Symphony—and a dance company, the New York City Ballet. Th e fi rst performance was given in Walt Disney Concert Hall in April 2009, on the next-to-last program Salonen would lead as the L.A. orchestra’s music director.

A lthough today Salonen is one of the few major musical fi gures who is known as both a composer and a conductor

of distinction, when he entered the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in the 1970s, it was to study horn and composition. He enrolled in Jorma Panula’s conducting class because he felt that young composers should learn to lead their own works. Composing remained Salonen’s focus: in Helsinki, he studied with the vision-ary Einojuhani Rautavaara, and in the early 1980s, he worked with Niccolò Castiglioni in Milan and in the Finnish Broadcasting Company studios. His earliest large-scale orchestral works date from this time (as does Floof, a setting for soprano and small ensem-ble of texts by Polish science fi ction writer Stanislaw Lem, which was the fi rst of Salonen’s compositions performed here in Symphony Center, on a MusicNOW concert in 2001).

After leading an acclaimed performance of Mahler’s Th ird Symphony on short notice in

ComPoSED2010–11

FIrST PErFormanCEFebruary 2011; Paris, France. The composer conducting

FIrST CSo PErFormanCESThese are the fi rst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances.

InSTrUmEnTaTIonthree fl utes and two piccolos, three oboes and english horn, three clari-nets, e-fl at clarinet and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, vibraphone, glockenspiel, tam-tam, tom-toms, bass drum, bongos, woodblock, tubular bells, sizzle cymbal, gongs, piano, celesta, harp, strings

aPProXImaTE PErFormanCE TImE18 minutes

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London in 1983, Salonen quickly became an internationally known conductor for whom composing was a sideline. Nearly a decade passed before he found the time to complete another major work. It was with the successful premiere of the LA Variations in 1997, written to showcase the Los Angeles Philharmonic, that Salonen at last entered a new and highly productive phase in his composing career. Ultimately, his decision to step down as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the end of the 2008–2009 season was motivated largely by the desire to dedicate himself more fully to composition.

ESa-PEkka SalonEn on NyxNyx is my return to the genre of pure orchestral music since Helix (2005). It employs a large orchestra and has exposed concertante parts for solo clarinet and the horn section.

Rather than utilizing the principle of con-tinuous variation of material, as is the case mostly in my recent music, Nyx behaves rather differently. Its themes and ideas essentially keep their properties throughout the piece, while the environment surrounding them keeps changing constantly. Mere whispers grow into roar; an intimate line of the solo clarinet becomes a slowly breathing broad melody of tutti strings at the end of the eighteen-minute arch of Nyx.

I set myself a particular challenge when start-ing the composition process, something I hadn’t done earlier: to write complex counterpoint for almost one hundred musicians playing tutti at full throttle without losing clarity of the different layers and lines; something that Strauss and Mahler so perfectly mastered. Not an easy task,

but a fascinating one. I leave it to the listener to judge how well I succeeded.

Nyx is a shadowy figure in Greek mythology. At the very beginning of everything, there’s a big mass of dark stuff called Chaos, out of which comes Gaia or Ge, the Earth, who gives birth (spontaneously!) to Uranus, the starry heaven, and Pontus, the sea. Nyx (also sometimes known as Nox) is supposed to have been another child of Gaia, along with Erebus. The union of Nyx and Erebus produces Day.

Another version says that Cronos (as Time) was there from the beginning. Chaos came from Time. Nyx was present as a sort of membrane surrounding Chaos, which had Phanes (Light) at its center. The union of Nyx with Phanes produced Heaven and Earth.

She is an extremely nebulous figure altogether; we have no sense of her character or personality. It is this very quality that has long fascinated me and made me decide to name my new orchestral piece after her.

I’m not trying to describe this mythical god-dess in any precise way musically. However, the almost constant flickering and rapid changing of textures and moods as well as a certain elusive character of many musical gestures may well be related to the subject.

I have always enjoyed the unrivaled dynamic range of a large symphony orchestra, but Nyx seems to take a somewhat new direction from my earlier orchestral music: there are many very delicate and light textures, chiaroscuro instead of details bathing in clear direct sunlight. I guess this is symptomatic of growing older as we real-ize there are no simple truths, no pure blacks and whites, but an endless variety of half shades.

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leoš Janáček

Sinfonietta

For every composer like Mendelssohn or Mozart, who begins to write signifi cant and lasting works as a child, there are fi gures such as Bruckner or Janáček, who don’t hit their stride until late in life. Janáček certainly would not be known to us

today had he, like Mozart, died at the age of thirty-fi ve. But, in his sixties, he was unexpect-edly inspired, and, after the success of his opera Jenůfa in 1916, he was instantly famous. For the next twelve years he wrote regularly, turning out one masterwork after another.

During the fi nal decade of his life, Kamila Stösslová, thirty-eight years younger than the composer and already married, contributed greatly to this creative fl urry as his reluctant muse. From the time they met in the summer of 1917, Janáček, despite his own marriage of some thirty-fi ve years, wrote her a letter almost daily, declaring his passion and telling her about the music that now suddenly fl owed from his pen. Kamila was polite but indiff erent, but that hardly seems to have mattered to Janáček. (And it apparently didn’t trouble his wife Zdenka at all, once she realized her husband loved a woman who would not return his aff ection.) Over the next eleven 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, Janáček kept a separate diary about Kamila. Th at 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 Janáček’s operatic heroines as well as his second string quartet, subtitled Intimate Letters (origi-nally Love Letters), which tells their story in the passionate but ambiguous language of music. Kamila was with Janáček the day he got the idea for the Sinfonietta in 1926. Th ey were sitting together in the park in the town of Písek (where she lived with her husband, an antiques dealer), listening to a band concert. Janáček had recently received a commission to write a fanfare for a national festival of gymnastics in Prague, and, with the fi rst sounds of this festive outdoor music that afternoon, he knew at once how to proceed. Th e idea of a brief fanfare quickly grew into the fi ve-movement Sinfonietta, his largest purely orchestral work. Each movement is scored for a diff erent—and unconventional—group of instru-ments; the sound of Janáček’s music is so idio-syncratic that for years unsympathetic listeners thought it was simply poorly orchestrated. But the raw, powerful, and often electrifying timbre is part of Janáček’s confi dent, utterly individual voice—matched by his unexpected choices of harmonies and the daring cut of his melodies.

T he Sinfonietta opens with echoes of the gymnastics music: brilliant, ath-letic fanfares for trumpets, tubas, and

timpani. Th ese two minutes of music—repetitive

ComPoSED1926

FIrST PErFormanCEJune 26, 1926; Prague, Czechoslovakia

FIrST CSo PErFormanCESnovember 2 & 3, 1950, Orchestra hall. rafael Kubelík conducting

moST rECEnT CSo PErFormanCESMarch 5, 6 & 7, 2009, Orchestra hall. Pierre Boulez conducting

March 9, 2009, Carnegie hall. Pierre Boulez conducting

InSTrUmEnTaTIonfour fl utes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, e-fl at clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, nine trumpets

in C and three trumpets in F, two bass trumpets, four trombones, two tenor tubas and bass tuba, timpani, cymbals, bells, harp, strings

aPProXImaTE PErFormanCE TImE22 minutes

CSo rECorDIng1970. Seiji Ozawa conducting. Angel

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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. (Haruki Murakami’s epic 2011 novel 1Q84 begins unfor-gettably with its heroine, Aomame, stuck in the back seat of a taxi in a Tokyo traffic jam, the clangorous sounds of

the Sinfonietta opening blasting from the radio—“probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic,” as Murakami writes. “She knew nothing about Janáček as a person,” he continues, “but she was quite sure that he never imagined that in 1984 someone would be listing to his composition in a hushed Toyota Crown Royal Saloon on the gridlocked ele-vated Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo.”)

The second movement, scored for winds, four trombones, and strings, is characterized by Janáček’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. Janáček’s music has its own logic;

if this movement were cut into pieces, we 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 flut-ist complained that the thirty-second-note runs just before the end were unplayable. “Play what you like,” Janáček 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 Janáček’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, Janáček creates a tension that is relieved only by the reappearance of the Sinfonietta’s opening fanfares, encircled now by eerie trills and climax-ing in great, shimmering waves of sound.

J anáček 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 eleven-year-old son. One day the boy disappeared, and, while searching the woods, Janáček caught a chill. The boy was found, but Janáček came down with pneumonia and died within days. Seven years later, Kamila died. Janáček’s widow Zdenka outlived them both.

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

Leoš Janáček with his wife Zdenka

© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra