Program

Thursday, May 8, 2014, at 8:00Friday, May 9, 2014, at 8:00Saturday, May 10, 2014, at 8:00

Bernard Labadie Conductormarc-andré Hamelin Piano

rigelSymphony in C Minor, Op. 12, No. 4Allegro assaiLargo non troppoAllegro spiritosoFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

HaydnPiano Concerto in D Major, Hob. XVIII:11VivaceUn poco adagioRondo all’ungherese: Allegro assai

MARC-ANDRé HAMeLIN

IntermIssIon

KrausSymphony in e Minor, VB 141Allegro spiritosoAdagio non tanto ma con espressionePrestoFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

BeethovenSymphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21Adagio molto—Allegro con brioAndante cantabile con motoMenuetto: Allegro molto e vivaceFinale: Adagio—Allegro molto e vivace

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

Friday’s concert honors the memory of Elizabeth Hoffman.

Saturday’s concert is sponsored by Mayer Brown LLP.

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

2

Comments by Phillip Huscher

Henri-Joseph rigelBorn February 9, 1741, Wertheim, Germany.Died May 2, 1799, Paris, France.

symphony in C minor, op. 12, no. 4

ComPoseDbefore 1774

FIrst PerFormanCedate unknown

FIrst Cso PerFormanCesThese are the fi rst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances.

InstrUmentatIontwo oboes, bassoon, two horns, strings

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme17 minutes

Although the Chicago Symphony has performed music by more than a thousand composers over the past 123 seasons, it has never before played a work by Henri-Joseph Rigel, whose C minor symphony opens this week’s concert. (Joseph

Martin Kraus, whose E minor symphony comes after intermission, is another newcomer to the Orchestra’s repertoire.) Rigel is virtually unknown to audiences today, but he was one of the most highly regarded composers in Paris, a great music capital, in the last years of the nineteenth century.

Rigel was born in Germany, studied with the well-known Neapolitan composer Niccolò Jommelli in Stuttgart, and then, after being sent to France “for the education of a young person,” as his fi rst biographer put it, he settled in Paris in 1767, at the age of twenty-six. Th at same year, his name appeared for the fi rst time in the catalog of the prestigious Leipzig music publisher, Breitkopf, as the composer of seven symphonies. (Six keyboard sonatas, published in Paris that year, are dedicated to Mlle Dupin de Francueil, who would later become the aunt of George Sand.)

Although he composed fourteen works for the stage—the music is mostly lost—Rigel’s chief success was with his instrumental music, which

includes more than twenty works for orchestra. In all, fourteen symphonies for orchestra were printed in Paris during Rigel’s lifetime. On February 2, 1774, one of Rigel’s symphonies was performed on a program at the Concert Spirituel, a prestigious series held in the Tuileries Palace, and that same year, Rigel (with his wife Marie serving as engraver) brought out his fi rst col-lection of six symphonies, op. 12. Th e C minor symphony performed this week is the fourth work in that set.

I n Paris at the time, the rage was for big orchestras, greatly expanded in size and quality over the early eighteenth-century

standard, and Rigel accordingly wrote large-scale eff ects and virtuosic parts, knowing that the Parisian players were among the best in Europe. In 1780, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, Rigel’s biographer, wrote that “All his eff ects are clear; his greatest symphonic pieces consistently have a natural melody.” Th e C minor symphony has the typical three movements of the day: a dramatic rapid opening; a slow, arialike centerpiece; and a spirited fi nale. Th e music is fully responsive to all the latest developments in European music. “He dislikes factions,” Laborde wrote, “and he does not devote himself exclusively to any genre; but recognizing the benefi ts of each style (French, Italian, German) he is one of the foreigners amongst us who do the greatest honor to music in France.”

3

Joseph HaydnBorn March 31, 1732, Rohrau, Austria.Died May 31, 1809, Vienna, Austria.

Piano Concerto in D major, Hob. XVIII:11

ComPoseDby 1784

FIrst PerFormanCedate unknown

FIrst Cso PerFormanCesMarch 20 & 21, 1931, Orchestra Hall. José Iturbi as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCesJune 5 & 6, 1980, Orchestra Hall. Raymond Leppard conducting from the harpsichord

July 18, 1986, Ravinia Festival. Alfred Brendel, Raymond Leppard conducting

InstrUmentatIonsolo piano, two oboes, two horns, strings

CaDenZaswanda Landowska

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme19 minutes

Th is was Haydn’s most popular concerto during his lifetime. It was published by eight houses in fi ve diff erent countries and regularly performed in Europe’s musical capitals. But by the time the Chicago Symphony was founded, a little more

than a hundred years after Haydn’s concerto was composed, it had become a rarity on concert programs. Oddly, it has never completely regained its popularity, even as Mozart’s piano concertos, written around the same time, have become part of our essential musical diet.

Unlike Mozart, Haydn was not a virtuoso pianist. (He was, however, a thoroughly compe-tent keyboard player, as his musicians knew well from rehearsing with him; his frequently mis-interpreted statement to his biographer, Georg Greisinger, that he “was no mean keyboard player” was simply characteristic of his life-long modesty.) Haydn never experienced anything like Mozart’s career as an international traveling key-board star, and he was not by nature a showman. Th at helps explain why he made so little impact in the very forms where Mozart excelled—opera and the piano concerto, both of which thrive on the drama of the solo voice pitted against the crowd. Instead, Haydn became known as a composer of symphonies—even as the “father” of

the symphony, an overstatement that nonetheless conveys his dominance in this form for so many years during its early development.

A lthough Haydn wrote one hundred and eight symphonies, sixty-eight string quartets, and forty-seven piano

sonatas, the catalog of his complete works lists a scant seventeen concertos composed over three decades—and most of those are lost. Many apparently were written quickly, for a single performance, and then set aside, with no eye to the future. Of those that remain, two cello concertos, the E-fl at trumpet concerto, three violin concertos, and this single piano concerto (compared to Mozart’s groundbreak-ing twenty-seven), are the best known.

T his D major concerto was published in 1784; the title page called it “the only Piano Concerto of Haydn which so far

has appeared in print,” a claim that would remain accurate for the rest of his life. Apparently, with this work Haydn was composing specifi cally for the modern piano rather than the old-fashioned harpsichord, for which he had written several earlier concertos. Th e form was enjoying great popularity at this time—Mozart introduced six new piano concertos in Vienna the same year Haydn’s score was published—but it isn’t clear what prompted Haydn’s return to the concerto. In any case, with this one work he established his

4

authority in a form Mozart was thought to own. Within the year, Haydn’s score was printed in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London.

Haydn writes in the standard three movements, but just as he managed to work wonders with the conventions of symphonic form again and again, each of the concerto movements offers a fresh take on a familiar form. The joys of Haydn’s writ-ing are always simple and unassuming—a quirky turn of phrase, an unexpected harmony, a teasing rhythmic pattern. Few of his compositions are ostentatious—in fact, much of his best music is actually much harder to play than it sounds,

and the difficulties of the piano part here are not the more obvious, crowd-pleasing ones—the high-wire acrobatics on which many a solo career depends. The piano writing in the slow movement abounds in long stretches of the most intricate rhapsodic decoration, but the satisfaction of this music is in its captivating, confiding manner, not in its flash. The lively finale is a rondo on a dance theme from Bosnia and Dalmatia, complete with trills and syncopations and the sounds of a drone accompaniment—the most common kind of dance music comfortably at home in the grand piano concerto.

CSO Resound is underwritten by a generous gift from Mr. & Mrs. Ralph Smykal.

Global Sponsor of the CSO

Riccardo Muti and the CSO at their best!

Available at Symphony Center, cso.org/resound, on iTunes, and in stores everywhere.

POWER AND DRAMA

5

Joseph martin KraussBorn June 20, 1756, Miltenberg am Main, Germany.Died December 15, 1792, Stockholm, Sweden.

symphony in e minor, VB 141

Of all the forgotten names in the history of music, Joseph Martin Kraus is one of the greatest mysteries. When he made his four-year grand tour of European music centers in the 1780s, traveling through Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and

England, he met Joseph Haydn in Vienna. Haydn later said he thought Kraus was a genius on the level of Gluck, Salieri, and even Mozart. “Th at man has a great style,” he reportedly commented, “the like of which I have found in no one else.” In Vienna, Kraus joined the same Masonic lodge as Mozart. Wherever he went, he moved in the right circles, from an artistic point of view.

After a substantial German education, which included studies in philosophy and law at Mainz and Göttingen, Kraus went to Stockholm, where he was bent on a career in music at the court of Gustav III. It was Gustav who ultimately sent him on the grand tour to absorb the musical fashions in continental Europe. In his travels, Kraus met not only Haydn, but Gluck and Salieri as well. (He arrived in England in time to participate in the Handel centenary celebrations of 1785.) After he returned to Stockholm, he

became Gustav’s favored musician, and, in 1792, attended the masked ball at which his patron was assassinated—the incident that would later inspire Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. Kraus him-self died from tuberculosis later that same year.

W e do not know how many sym-phonies Kraus wrote; the fourteen that survive span his entire career,

from his earliest student days in Mannheim to a funeral symphony for Gustav III, written just a few months before his own death. Th e authorship of the E minor symphony performed this week used to be up for debate: one source, a manuscript housed in Regensburg, is attributed to Kraus; another, printed by the Paris pub-lisher Boyer, credits Giuseppe Cambini as the composer. (Kraus visited both Regensburg and Paris on his European tour.) Recent scholarship has placed the work fi rmly in Kraus’s catalog, but, even so, the exact date of its composition is a matter of conjecture. Apparently Boyer decided that Kraus was not well enough known to sell in Paris, and used Cambini’s name, which evidently had market appeal at the time, instead. Kraus’s E minor symphony, in the traditional three-movement design, demonstrates the fruits of a happy union of German training, cosmo-politan outlook, and genuine originality.

ComPoseD1780s

FIrst PerFormanCedate unknown

FIrst Cso PerFormanCesThese are the fi rst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances.

InstrUmentatIonfl ute, two oboes, bassoon, two horns, strings

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme15 minutes

6

Ludwig van BeethovenBorn December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany.Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria.

symphony no. 1 in C major, op. 21

ComPoseD1799–1800

FIrst PerFormanCeApril 2, 1800; Vienna, Austria

FIrst Cso PerFormanCesMay 4 & 5, 1894, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCesJune 15 & 16, 2010, Orchestra Hall. Bernard Haitink conducting

InstrUmentatIontwo fl utes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme25 minutes

Cso reCorDIngs1949. Fritz Busch conducting. CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the Twentieth Century: Collector’s Choice)

1961. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1974. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

1989. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

Th is is a young man’s music. As the fi rst symphony by the greatest symphonist who ever lived, one might expect clues of the daring and novelty to come; since it was written at the turn of the century and pre-miered in Vienna, the

great musical capital, in 1800, one might assume that it is with this work that Beethoven opened a new era in music. But, in fact, this symphony belongs to the eighteenth, not the nineteenth, century; it honors the tradition of Mozart, dead less than a decade, and Haydn, who had given Beethoven enough lessons to know that his student would soon set out on his own.

Th e First Symphony is a conservative work by the least conservative of composers. (Just two years later, Beethoven proudly announced that he would follow a “new path.”) Alexander Th ayer, who wrote the fi rst signifi cant book on Beethoven, saw 1800 as a turning point in the composer’s career: “It is the year in which, cutting loose from the pianoforte, he asserted his claims to a position with Mozart and the still living and productive Haydn in the higher forms of chamber and orchestral compositions—the quartet and the symphony.”

It was a bold step for a young composer (Beethoven wasn’t yet thirty) to write his fi rst

symphony when Haydn’s fi nal work in the form was just fi ve years old and Mozart’s Jupiter a scant twelve. But this was perhaps the best—and certainly the riskiest—way for Beethoven to stake his claim to their territory. Beethoven had moved to Vienna in 1792, the year after Mozart died, and in the famous words of Count Waldstein, he was to “receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.” Beethoven learned plenty from the example of Haydn’s music, but the actual lessons he had with the master didn’t go well, and Beethoven quickly understood that if he was to play a role in this great Viennese tradition, he would have to carve out a place for himself, all by himself.

B eethoven began to sketch a symphony in C major in 1795, and he was still struggling with it during a concert tour

to Prague and Berlin the following year. But Beethoven apparently wasn’t ready to reckon with this great form yet, and he turned his attention primarily to the piano sonata, which became the vehicle for his most advanced ideas. In 1799, the year he composed one of his real watershed works, the Pathétique Sonata, Beethoven decisively returned to the idea of writing a symphony. Th e C major sym-phony he fi nished early in 1800 is the fi rst of eight he would compose in thirteen years.

On April 2, 1800, Beethoven held a concert in Vienna’s Burgtheater, the fi rst he would give

7

The old Burgtheater in the Michaelerplatz, Vienna; engraving by Carl Postl, 1810. Beethoven gave his first public benefit concert here on April 2, 1800.

for his own benefit in this opinionated and difficult music center. In a gesture of savvy public relations, he included a symphony by Mozart and two numbers from Haydn’s Creation on the pro-gram to set the scene for his own music—some of it new, like the Septet that quickly became one of his most popular pieces, and this First Symphony. Sadly—inexplicably—the Viennese critics ignored the performance, but the Leipzig correspondent called it “truly the most interest-ing concert in a long time.”

B eethoven’s First Symphony is scored for the orchestra of Haydn and Mozart, including the clarinets that weren’t yet a

standard feature, and written in the conventional four-movement form he would soon transform. Although it’s a surprisingly cautious work from a bold and sometimes brazen composer, it’s neither

faceless nor unaccomplished (and the critics of the time found it neither timid nor derivative).

Beethoven begins, slyly, with the kind of cadences that normally end a work, stated in the wrong key—or, rather, searching for the right key. (Haydn had used a similar trick in his string quartets, but never to open a symphony.) Beethoven liked the effect so much that he did something comparable in his next work, The Creatures of Prometheus. The entire movement sparkles with genuine energy and is particularly colored by the brilliant and inventive writing for winds (one critic complained that “it sounded more like a wind band than an orchestra”).

The slow movement is charming and graceful; it is slight, as sometimes suggested, only by the composer’s own later standards. Beethoven calls the next movement a minuet, but both his tempo (Allegro molto e vivace) and a very swift metronome marking argue that this is really the first of his true symphonic scherzos. (Haydn had begun to write third-movement scherzos in his string quartets, but he didn’t transfer that crucial development into his symphonies.) The finale, with its humorous slow introduction, is as playful and spirited as anything in Haydn. It is not yet the heroic or the revolutionary Beethoven, but it proves brilliantly that the student had learned his teacher’s lessons well.

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

© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra