PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, May 26, 2016, at 8:00 Friday, May 27, 2016, at 1:30Saturday, May 28, 2016, at 8:00Sunday, May 29, 2016, at 3:00Tuesday, May 31, 2016, at 7:30

Cristian Măcelaru ConductorAlisa Weilerstein CelloWomen of the Chicago Symphony Chorus

Duain Wolfe Director

IbertBacchanaleFirst CSO performances

DusapinOutscape

ALISA WEILERSTEIN

World premiereCommissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Mrs. Harold C. Smith Fund for New MusicCo-commission with Oper Stuttgart and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

INTERMISSION

HolstThe Planets, Op. 32Mars, the Bringer of WarVenus, the Bringer of PeaceMercury, the Winged MessengerJupiter, the Bringer of JollitySaturn, the Bringer of Old AgeUranus, the MagicianNeptune, the Mystic

WOMEN OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS

The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie.

Thursday’s performance is generously sponsored by Terrence and Laura Truax.

The Friday matinee performance is generously sponsored by an anonymous donor.

CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.

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

Jacques Ibert Born August 15, 1890, Paris, France.Died February 5, 1962, Paris, France.

Bacchanale

Jacques Ibert is buried among the cypress and chestnut trees in Paris’s Passy Cemetery, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. His grave isn’t far from those of Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy. Fate hasn’t been particularly kind to Ibert,

especially outside his native France, and since he died in 1962, his music has nearly slipped from the repertoire. He is revered neither as a polished master such as Fauré nor as a modern visionary like Debussy. The fact that he never belonged to any stylistic “school,” such as the flippant, headline-grabbing Les six of his friends Honegger and Milhaud, has made it harder to categorize him—and easier to lose sight of him on the congested roadmap of twentieth-century music. As a result, he’s often thought of as a peripheral figure, and even his best work is sometimes unfairly dismissed as slight or superficial.

But Ibert is a true original, and he was a composer of substance from the start. He first attracted attention in 1922 with his three-move-ment orchestral piece inspired by The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde’s poem about the execution of a convicted murderer from a nearby cell during his own incarceration on morals charges—a work that’s entirely at odds with Ibert’s reputation for light music. His only string

quartet, composed twenty years later, reflects the turmoil and trauma of World War II.

At first, Ibert hoped to be an actor, and even after he switched to the study of music, his pas-sion for drama gave his own works an unmistak-ably theatrical quality. At the Paris Conservatory, he studied with Émile Pessard, who had taught Ravel, and then in Gédalge’s classes, where he met Honegger and Milhaud. During World War I, Ibert interrupted his studies to serve as a nurse and stretcher-bearer on the front lines. His big career break came in 1919, when he won the coveted Prix de Rome (on his first try, unlike Berlioz) for his cantata Le poète et la fée (The poet and the fairy).

If Ibert is difficult to pigeonhole as a com-poser, that’s largely his own doing, for he wrote a wide range of music in many genres and for many purposes—from background music for a Paris festival of water and light to cadenzas for Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Under the influence of his lifelong love for the theater, he wrote seven operas and five ballets, as well as scores for radio dramas and incidental music for many plays, including his own take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He turned his uproarious score for Labiche’s classic farce, An Italian Straw Hat, into a divertissement, one of his most often-played works. He was a natural to write music for film, which he did throughout his career. In 1948, he scored Orson Welles’s Macbeth, and four years later he provided the opening circus ballet sequence (based on the Pagliacci tale) for Gene

COMPOSED1956

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 2, 1956, broadcast on BBC’s Third Programme

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performances of Ibert’s Bacchanale.

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME10 minutes

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Pascal DusapinBorn May 29, 1955, Nancy, France.

Outscape, Concerto for Cello and Orchestra

COMPOSED2014–15

These are the world premiere performances

Commissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Mrs. Harold C. Smith Fund for New Music

Co-commission with Oper Stuttgart and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo cello, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, glockenspiel, bells, crotales, cymbals, medium and large lam-tams, castanets, bass drum, snare drum, bongos, gongs, temple blocks, woodblocks, “pop” bass drum, tambourine, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME28 minutes

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For Pascal Dusapin, Outscape, his new cello concerto being pre-miered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week, is the latest installment in his fascination with exploring the connec-tion between music and

nature. For Alisa Weilerstein, for whom it was written, it has come to be part of a cycle of bringing new life into the world this year—her daughter was born just last month, while Weilerstein was in the process of learning Dusapin’s new score, making the relationship between music and life especially meaningful. (She will introduce yet another cello concerto, written for her by Matthias Pintscher, later this year.) As the newest addition to a large list of pieces premiered by the Chicago Symphony over

its long life, Outscape is a reminder that the complex creative process of commissioning, writing, and preparing new works of music is, above all, a powerful and often deeply personal human experience.

Pascal Dusapin was first attracted to music at an early age, after hearing a jazz trio while on vacation with his family. He begged to learn the clarinet, but at his father’s insistence he studied piano instead, and eventually became infatuated with playing the organ. Hearing Edgard Varèse’s Arcana, a grand, noisy, utterly individual master-work at the age of eighteen was a revelation; he knew then that he would devote the rest of his life to composing. His training and his career proceeded in unconventional yet, for him, utterly natural ways. In the 1970s, he abandoned studies with the grand man of French composition, Olivier Messiaen, after just one year in order to work with the iconoclastic Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, whom he viewed as the artistic

Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance, Hollywood’s first all-dance film.

T he Bacchanale that he composed at the very end of his career was commissioned by the BBC for the tenth anniversary

of its radio show, Third Programme, which was known for the cultural and intellectual heft of its programming. Ibert’s contribution is a brilliant scherzo for full orchestra. Like the famous

bacchanales in Samson and Delilah and in the Venusberg scene of Wagner’s Tannhauser, Ibert’s score is a fulsome riot of color and texture. From the opening measure, his rhythmic patterns are insistent and his pace relentless, although the mood relaxes temporarily in the middle portion. The Bacchanale is a far cry from the sober music the BBC was known for broadcasting at the time, but as a celebratory toast and a tribute to the seductive thrill of orchestral music, it is ideal.

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descendent of Varèse. Over the years, Dusapin has never been a member of any “school” or fashion, although he has absorbed elements from many. As he once said, he learned a great deal from Pierre Boulez, but also from the so-called minimalist Steve Reich.

Dusapin’s career-spanning stage works suggest the freedom of his imagination and the range of ideas that attract him. Beginning with Romeo and Juliet, a reimagining of the Shakespeare play composed in the mid-1980s, they include Medeamaterial, a companion piece to Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas; To Be Sung, a chamber opera with a libretto by the composer based on texts by Gertrude Stein and designed in tan-dem with a light installation by the pioneering American artist James Turrell; and Penthesilea, an adaptation of the classic 1808 verse play by Heinrich von Kleist about Achilles’s confronta-tion with the queen of the Amazons. (Dusapin also sees it as an allegory for modern times—“It is the insanity today in Syria, Ukraine, Kosovo,” he told The New York Times a year ago.) O Mensch!, a hard-to-classify work from 2009—it is essentially a song cycle with stage directions—is based on poems by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Many of Dusapin’s orchestral works have included prominent solo roles, even if they are not all concertos in the conventional sense. Watt, which was inspired by Beckett’s novel, features the trombone. Celo is the punning title of a cello concerto. Galim is scored for flute and orchestra. Aufgang (German for ascent), a violin concerto from 2011 that demonstrates the power of Dusapin’s language, presents the soloist as a kind of visionary who leads the orchestra “to the heav-ens and the light.” Dusapin also often thinks in terms of large multi-work cycles that occupy him over the span of many years. His seven orchestral Solos were composed between 1991 and 2009. This new work, Outscape, is the second work in a new cycle of orchestral scores indebted to nature, and it brings together these two strands of Dusapin’s output—the cyclic concept and the concerto format—in a single work. Morning in Long Island, the first work in this series, was suggested by the “shape of the wind” as daylight overtakes the darkness of night. It was inspired by a sleepless night Dusapin spent on a Long Island beach when he visited the United States in 1988.

D usapin began this new cello concerto with a title, An Idea of North, in the back of his mind—a reflection of his “conceptual fas-

cination” with the far north mixed with the mem-ory of a “crazy” car trip to the limits of the Artic Polar Circle that he took when he was twenty-five. (For his temporary title, Dusapin was indebted to The Idea of North, a short film the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould made about his obsession with the Arctic.) “The more I compose this work,” Dusapin told The New York Times in 2014, “the more the idea of a desert of snow is present. It’s very calm for me—the music is not—but this inspires me.” But as he got further into the composition process, the more he realized his work wasn’t about any-thing that concrete. Like many composers before him, he wanted to avoid having his score saddled with useless programmatic interpretations—he wanted the music to speak for itself. Eventually, he came to realize that the word “outscape” suggested the sense of “indetermination” he had been after all along, and that the use of a soloist, playing in front of an orchestra, could more powerfully con-vey the nature and essence of the kind of personal journey he had in mind.

Following the Chicago premiere this week, Outscape will be performed in Stuttgart in June, in Paris next April, and in London in the summer of 2017.

Pascal Dusapin on Outscape

O utscape is my second score for cello and orchestra. The first was written in 1996 and was called Celo (to keep a secret in

Latin). Even after all these years, I knew that one day I would once again encounter a concerto for that instrument. And then along came the com-mission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for Alisa Weilerstein. I was dazzled by Alisa’s tone and phrasing, and by her incredible ease in addressing the most diverse repertoires (from Elliott Carter to Edward Elgar via Haydn!), and I immediately felt that a new composition could be inspired by such magnificent, unfettered musical energy. To bring together such an artist with an orchestra as majestic as the CSO is an extremely rare challenge for a composer. I was very happy to have composed this score for such musicians.

But it’s difficult for me to explain my work because the substance of thought is confused

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In 1930, the American astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh took a series of photographs at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, that confirmed his discovery of Pluto, the ninth major planet of the solar system. By then Gustav Holst’s The Planets

had already achieved such immense popularity with symphony audiences that Holst felt no need to add a new Pluto movement to make music conform to science. That turned out to be a wise decision: on August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union declassified Pluto to a minor planet, returning the solar system to the one Holst had set to music and creating a new verb in the process—“to pluto,” to demote or devalue someone or something, voted the 2006 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

In the 1920s, the swift, overwhelming suc-cess of The Planets both surprised and irritated

Holst—much as Boléro would come to embarrass Ravel—who insisted that it wasn’t his best work. But the public was captivated by the combination of music and astrology—the music of the spheres made manifest. (Frederick Stock gave the U.S. premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on New Year’s Eve 1920, just six weeks after the first complete performance in London.)

It was Clifford Bax, the brother of composer Arnold Bax, who introduced Holst to astrology shortly after they met in 1913. Like countless people since—from true scientists to supermarket tabloid fans—Holst was fascinated by the move-ments of the heavenly bodies and their influence on everyday people. Before beginning work on The Planets in 1914, Holst wrote to a friend:

I only study things that suggest music to me. Recently the character of each planet sug-gested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely. It’s a pity we make such a fuss about these things. On one side there is nothing but abuse and ridicule, with

with the flow of the music. To compose is to cre-ate a living thing. The music comes to life itself: it draws the force of its regeneration from its own dynamism; it invents its own future, the condi-tions of its form, and the emotions it produces. Ultimately, something has been said.

The title carries the musical project within itself. Outscape is a rather unusual English word (at least for a French speaker); it’s a rich word that has a variety of meanings, from the most common to the more philosophical. Outscape is the route, or the opportunity to flee, to invent your own path. I loved this word because, fundamentally, it is like a summary of my work history: escape elsewhere in order to understand and ascertain, and try to see and hear further.

That’s how this concerto is invented by itself, by going incessantly back and forth between a cello “becoming an orchestra” and

an orchestra “becoming a cello.” Every musical force wants to go towards the other; to merge with the “otherness”; to get to know and become those differences; to escape, return, and gener- ate a renewed musical future. In Outscape, I’ve never felt like I put the soloist and orchestra in opposition; instead, I guide them towards each other.

At the beginning of Outscape, everything seems simple: the cello plays a low note, a C-sharp. The bass clarinet immediately plays the same note: an echo, the note’s shadow. By mimicking each other in turn, the cello and bass clarinet—followed by the whole orchestra—will learn to sing and unfold together, imagine multiple ways to escape, and together invent another “nature . . .”

I dedicate Outscape to Bill Brown, for his wonderful support and friendship.

Gustav HolstBorn September 21, 1874, Cheltenham, England.Died May 25, 1934, London, England.

The Planets, Suite for Large Orchestra, Op. 32

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Gustav Holst’s suite for large orchestra, The Planets, was conceived to be “connected with astrology rather than astronomy. There is no ‘program’ attached to the work beyond that which is associated with the subtitles of the movements,” according to Felix Borowski’s note in the CSO’s program book.

The first complete performance of all seven movements was given in London on November 15, 1920, with Albert Coates conducting the London Symphony

Orchestra. Less than two months later, on New Year’s Eve, Frederick Stock led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (the offstage women’s chorus was omitted) in the U.S. premiere of The Planets at Orchestra Hall.

“His rhythmic figures are fascinating, curious, and irresistible. The demonic insistent martial pulse of the first fragment, ‘Mars, Bringer of War,’ was the most vital sample,” wrote Ruth Miller in the Chicago Tribune. “The Planets should be a most dependable and successful addition to the orchestra repertoire.”

“The Planets . . . is the music of a master composer,” added the reviewer in the Chicago American. “It came as a surprise to us, for it had been unheralded and Holst is virtually unknown to the average American music lover. But henceforth his name will stand for the representative musical art of present-day England. In fact, the work is certainly the best I have heard by a modern composer in many a day.”

Holst later guest conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in several of his works in Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan’s annual May Festival in 1923 and 1932. At the thirtieth festival in 1923, he led the Orchestra in his Beni mora on May 16, Hymn of Jesus (in its U.S. premiere) and A Dirge for Two Veterans on May 17, and a suite from his opera The Perfect Fool on May 18. Holst returned to the festival on May 19, 1932,

to lead his orchestration of Bach’s G major fugue for organ (BWV 577), the suite from The Perfect Fool, and the U.S. premiere of his Choral Fantasia.

Frank Villella is the director of the Rosenthal Archives. For more information regarding the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s anniversary season, please visit cso.org/125moments.

Composers in Chicago

Detail of the cover of the score used by Frederick Stock for the U.S. premiere performances (3296 is the number assigned to the work by the Orchestra’s librarians, a system still in use today)

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the natural result that when one is brought face to face with overwhelming proofs, there is a danger of going to the other extreme. Whereas, of course, everything in this world is just one big miracle. Or rather, the universe itself is one.

During his two years of work on The Planets, Holst became, in his own words, “a skilled inter-preter of horoscopes,” and privately admitted that casting horoscopes for friends was a “pet vice.” (The Planets took two years to complete because

of Holst’s teaching commitments at Saint Paul’s Girls’ School; he could only compose on weekends and during the August vaca-tion, when he locked himself in the stifling soundproof room of the school’s new music wing and wrote without interruption.)

Holst had long shown an interest in exotic subjects—he became interested in Hindu litera-ture and philosophy as a student, taught himself Sanskrit, and set his own translations of Sanskrit texts to music. It was his settings of verses from the Rig Veda that introduced Holst’s music to Clifford Bax in 1913, and, in turn, inspired Bax to bring up the subject of astrology.

At the time of the first complete performance of The Planets in 1920, Holst was nervous that the public would read too much into his new work:

These pieces were suggested by the astrolog-ical significance of the planets; there is no program music in them, neither have they any connection with the deities of classical mythology bearing the same names. If any guide to the music is required, the subtitle to each piece will be found sufficient, especially if it can be used in a broad sense.

W hen the score was published the following year, Holst was careful to give it the plain subtitle “Suite

for Large Orchestra,” again suggesting that The Planets should be considered as music first and last. Holst’s daughter Imogen, a musician herself, remembered that at the first private performance in 1919, the audience felt certain that the first movement, Mars, the Bringer of War—with its horrible pounding rhythm, ungainly march (in an unmarchable 5/4 time), and noisy brass

COMPOSED1914–16

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 15, 1920; London, England

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESDecember 31, 1920 & January 1, 1921, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting (U.S. premiere)

August 11, 1977, Ravinia Festival. Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis, director), Lawrence Foster conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 27, 28 & 29, 2008, Orchestra Hall. Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain Wolfe, director), Charles Dutoit conducting

March 30, 2008, Orchestra Hall. Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain Wolfe, director), Charles Dutoit conducting (Beyond the Score)

July 31, 2012, Ravinia Festival. Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Duain Wolfe, director), John Axelrod conducting

July 11, 2014, Ravinia Festival. Robert Moody conducting (Mars, Uranus, and Jupiter)

INSTRUMENTATIONfour flutes, two piccolos and bass flute, three oboes, bass oboe and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, two tenor trombones and bass trombone, tenor tuba and bass tuba, timpani,

triangle, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, gong, bells, glockenspiel, xylophone, celesta, two harps, organ, strings, and, in the final movement only, an offstage choir of women’s voices

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME51 minutes

CSO RECORDING1989. Women of the Chicago Symphony Chours (Margaret Hillis, director), James Levine conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

Holst at his desk in Saint Paul’s Girls’ School

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fanfares—was a description of the war that was still going on, but, in fact, Holst had finished Mars early in the summer of 1914, before the outbreak of war that August. “After two mech-anized wars,” Imogen later wrote, “it would be easy to take it for granted that [Mars] had been commissioned as background music for a documentary film of a tank battle, but Holst had never heard a machine gun when he wrote it, and the tank had not yet been invented.”

Even in 1919, peace could not have sounded more seductive than it does in the second move-ment, Venus, with its celestial wind chords, calm harp strumming, and floating violin melodies. Mercury begins as a scherzo of Mendelssohnian lightness, though it includes instruments like the bass oboe Mendelssohn never heard, and even-tually reaches a climax that is very modern in its orchestral ingenuity. (Holst’s choice of instru-mental colors is always keen, a reminder that when his own musical schooling disappointed him, he read Berlioz’s exhaustive, classic treatise on instrumentation from cover to cover.)

With its dancing tempo and cheerful theme, Jupiter is a friendly and inviting planet (at the first rehearsal of this movement, the cleaning women in the corridors of the Queen’s Hall reportedly put down their mops and began to dance). A few years later, Holst brought Jupiter down to earth by turning its big central mel-ody into the patriotic anthem “I vow to thee, my country.” Saturn is remote and mysterious, suggesting the slow but relentless march of time and making humankind seem very small and insignificant. (Holst said it was his favorite

movement.) Uranus, the Magician throws out a handful of notes, then continues to toss them around the orchestra, all the while inventing new themes, combining materials, switching meters, and sidestepping any firm sense of central key.

Neptune, the planet farthest from the earth, offers an astonishing glimpse of eternity. Holst’s music, characterized not by melody or harmony but by unforgettable chilling sounds and colors, owes much to Debussy, although Holst claimed he wasn’t a fan—he admired The Afternoon of a Faun, liked the nocturnes, “was never very happy about anything else,” and “hated” Pelleas and Melisande. Holst took the idea of a wordless female chorus from Debussy’s Sirens, but puts it offstage. Beginning pianissimo (the original manuscript suggested pppp), it concludes this astrological tour with a single measure of music, repeated, each time more quietly, until the sound is virtually lost in silence.

A footnote. In 2000, six years before Pluto was reclassified, Colin Matthews, an English composer, musicologist, and Holst enthusiast, composed “Pluto, the Renewer,” an addendum to The Planets that emerges directly from the famous fade-out with which Holst concluded his score eighty-five years earlier. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played it as a postscript to Holst’s score in March 2001.

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

© 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra