Program
One Hundred Twenty-first Season
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Thursday, January 26, 2012, at 8:00
Friday, January 27, 2012, at 8:00
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Saturday, January 28, 2012, at 8:00
Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at 7:30
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Maria Grazia Schiavo Soprano
Max Emanuel Cencic Countertenor
Stéphane Degout Baritone
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Director
Chicago Children’s Choir
Josephine Lee Artistic Director
Smirnov
Space Odyssey
World premiere
Schubert
Symphony No. 3 in D Major, D. 200
Adagio maestoso—Allegro con brio
Allegretto
Menuetto
Presto vivace
Intermission
Orff
Carmina Burana
Fortune, Empress of the World
I. Springtime
On the Green
II. In the Tavern
III. The Courts of Love
Blanziflor and Helena
Fortune, Empress of the World
Maria Grazia Schiavo
Max Emanuel Cencic
Stéphane Degout
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Chicago Children’s Choir
These concerts are generously sponsored in part by Mr. & Mrs. Sanfred Koltun.
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.
Comments by Gerard McBurney Phillip Huscher
Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov
Born November 2, 1948, Minsk.
Space Odyssey for Large Symphony
Orchestra, Op. 156
A
mong Russian composers
emerging from the USSR in
the last half century, one of the
most prolific and adventurous
is Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov.
He was born in 1948 in Minsk
(now the capital of the Republic
of Belarus), but his parents, both
opera singers, then moved their
family several thousand miles to
Siberia, Ulan-Ude (the capital of
Buryat-Mongolia), and later to the
Central Asian town of Frunze (now
Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan),
where the young composer grew
up, on the edge of the Tian Shan
mountains, and not far from the
western borders of China.
In his late teens, Smirnov
returned to European Russia,
where he studied at the Moscow
Conservatory with two composers,
Nikolai Sidelnikov and Edison
Denisov, and with musical theorist
Yuri Kholopov. He also took private lessons with the elderly Philip
Composed
2008, revised 2011
These are the world
premiere performances.
Approximate
performance time
7 minutes
2
Gershkovich, a remarkable musician from Rumania who had lived
in Vienna in the 1930s and been
a pupil of both Berg and Webern
before the rise of Hitler forced him
to the Soviet Union. For many
Russian composers of Smirnov’s
generation, Gershkovich seemed,
as one of his friends somewhat
bluntly put it, “like an apostle sent
by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
to the barbarians.”
In 1972, Dmitri Smirnov graduated from the conservatory. In the
same year, he married a fellow
student, the equally distinguished
composer Elena Firsova. The couple
have two children, one an artist; the other a composer, pianist,
and conductor.
For nearly two decades, Smirnov
earned his living in Moscow, partly
working in publishing and writing
film music, but mostly concentrating on being a freelance composer.
Quite quickly, his work and that of
Instrumentation
three flutes, piccolo and
alto flute, three oboes and
english horn, two clarinets
and bass clarinet, three
bassoons, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones
and tuba, timpani, triangle,
cymbals, gongs, snare
drum, bass drum, tam-tam,
glockenspiel, tubular bells,
vibraphone, marimba,
harp, strings
his wife began to attract attention
in the West, and this led to their
both being publically castigated by
the notorious Tikhon Khrennikov,
head of the Composers’ Union, for
their failure to write the kind of
music officially sanctioned by the
Soviet authorities. Undaunted by
this criticism, Smirnov and Firsova
soon found themselves unofficial
leaders in the world of new Soviet
music of the nonofficial kind, in
touch with their colleagues all over
the world and frequently having
their works performed in Europe
and North America.
Over the last forty years, Dmitri
Smirnov has built up an impressive
work list of more than 160 pieces,
with several symphonies, many
concertos, and a huge output of
chamber music. Especially notable
are his many compositions, including two operas, inspired by the
poetry and painting of William
Blake, whom the young composer
discovered quite early in his artistic
journey, and to whom he has
remained faithful ever since.
In 1991, faced with threats and
chaos in their native land, Smirnov
and Firsova took the difficult
decision to emigrate to the U.K.
with their young children. After
residencies at various British
universities, the couple eventually
settled in St. Albans, just north
of London. Since 2003, Smirnov
has taught at Goldsmith’s College,
London, an institution with a
particular interest in Russian music
and musicians.
—Gerard McBurney
Dmitri N. Smirnov on
Space Odyssey
I
deas for new pieces of music can
come from very different and
unexpected sources. Sometimes
they are simply the result of a chat
with friends and colleagues.
That is how Space Odyssey came
about. A close friend of mine was
complaining about how composers now write too many long and
turgid pieces, that are nearly all
quite impossible to program. And
he asked me a strange question:
Where are the modern
composers who could write
something like the oldfashioned overtures that used
to open concerts? Whom do
you know who could come up
with a brilliant concert opener
fulfilling ALL five of the following criteria:
(1) As fast as the Ruslan and
Ludmila overture; (2) As bold
and striking as the overture
to La forza del destino; (3) As
beautifully orchestrated as an
overture by Berlioz; (4) Lasting
no longer than seven minutes;
and (5) Making the audience burst into spontaneous
applause, as though they’d seen
the most beautiful shooting star?
Of course, I had no answer to
such a ridiculous question. But I
also thought, there’s no harm in
trying. So about three days later,
I sent my friend an e-mail with
3
forty pages of orchestral score:
Space Odyssey. I have no idea
whether this piece fulfills all my
friend’s demands, but it certainly
fulfills one of them: played at
the correct tempo, it lasts exactly
seven minutes.
Why the title? In my youth,
growing up in the Far East of
the USSR, I was fascinated by
astronomy and always thrilled to
hear stories about Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts,
and the different spaceships and
space programs. It was a pleasure
to try to reflect these early interests
and enthusiasms in this music. I’d
rather not say anything about the
plot or musical narrative, as I hope
it will be easily enough picked up,
but I would say that while composing these seven minutes of music,
I did think about the courage of
those brave adventurers who risked
their lives setting out on the odysseys of our age. We all know that,
unfortunately, such journeys are not
always successful and that any tiny
insignificant mistake can lead to
deadly consequences. But if they are
successful, they are triumphant! Gerard McBurney is creative director
of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s
Beyond the Score series.
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4
Franz Schubert
Born January 31, 1797, Himmelpfortgrund, northwest of
Vienna, Austria.
Died November 19, 1828, Vienna, Austria.
Symphony No. 3 in D Major, D. 200
T
he most productive year of
Schubert’s life was 1815. He
was still a schoolmaster then—a
prisoner of the classroom who filled
his free time writing the music that
would one day make him famous.
Schubert’s off-hours produced an
extraordinary harvest that year:
two piano sonatas; a set of variations on an original theme; dances
for keyboard; a string quartet; two
masses and considerable miscellaneous choral music; four operas—
including Claudine von Villa Bella,
which lost its second and third acts
when the servants of Schubert’s
friend, Josef Hüttenbrenner, used
the manuscript to start fires during
the cold winter of 1848; some 145
songs, including Erlkönig, long
considered his greatest; and this
Composed
May 24–July 19, 1815
First performance
Private: probably 1815,
Vienna
Public: February 19, 1881,
London
D major symphony. Not all the
music is important or memorable
(Schubert was only eighteen); he
must have been writing at breakneck speed and often well into the
night. But much of it is impressive
regardless of the circumstances, and
some of the songs, in particular,
are among his finest works—they
reveal a gift too strong and an
imagination too vivid to be stifled
even by the dull rigor of drilling
reluctant boys and anticipating
their mischief.
Schubert’s manuscript tells us he
began this symphony on May 24,
the same day he wrote a piece for
women’s chorus and horns. (He
had finished a one-act Singspiel
five days earlier.) Over the next few
days, he wrote several more choral
First CSO
performances
July 2, 1955, Ravinia
Festival. Eduard van
Beinem conducting
Instrumentation
two flutes, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons,
two horns, two trumpets,
timpani, strings
January 31, 1959 (Popular
concert), Orchestra
Hall. Sir Thomas
Beecham conducting
Approximate
performance time
25 minutes
Most recent
CSO performance
November 27, 2004,
Orchestra Hall. Pinchas
Zukerman conducting
5
works and a number of songs; he
completed the Adagio maestoso
introduction and the first few pages
of the Allegro of the symphony
and then put the score aside. He
returned to the Allegro on July 11;
the symphony was completed in
eight days. History is filled with
stories of fine music written at
astonishing speed, but Schubert
often did his best work in great
haste—he once jotted down a
song, fully formed, on the back of a
café menu.
We might well guess, from
listening to this symphony, that
Schubert played in an orchestra
that regularly performed symphonies by Haydn and Mozart—as
well the earliest ones by Beethoven.
But we also notice a distinctive
way with traditional forms—any
composer capable of writing one of
the most extraordinary songs in the
literature, Gretchen am Spinnrade, at
the age of seventeen had found his
own voice at an early age. By the
time he wrote that song in 1814,
Schubert had finished his first
symphony. And by the time he finished this one, his third, less than
a year later, Schubert had written
what many composers would gladly
claim as a life’s work—and he had
traveled light years in the perfection of his own style.
6
The first movement begins, like
many of Haydn’s, with a slow
introduction. The manuscript
shows that Schubert struggled with
the bubbling clarinet theme that
launches the Allegro con brio, scoring it first for oboe and horns, and
then for strings before finding the
right sound. The movement itself
is fluent and highly untroubled;
the coda returns to the ascending
scales of the introduction. Schubert
originally planned to write an
adagio for the second movement—he even sketched a theme
in this tempo. But he settled on a
fresh and unassuming allegretto
instead. The third movement is a
forceful minuet, its trio a charming
waltz. The finale, marked presto
vivace, begins pianissimo and then
explodes with energy.
Schubert’s first six symphonies
were rarely performed for many
years. It was Antonín Dvořák who
began to play them in Prague near
the end of the nineteenth century,
and who wrote about them while
he was in this country, saying,
“the more I study them, the more
I marvel.” Even though Schubert’s
name was engraved on the front of
Orchestra Hall when it was built
in 1904, his third symphony wasn’t
played here for another fiftyfive years. Carl Orff
Born July 10, 1895, Munich, Bavaria.
Died March 29, 1982, Munich, Bavaria.
Carmina Burana
W
hen Carmina Burana made
him an overnight celebrity
at the age of forty-two, Carl Orff
decided to start his career over
from scratch. Immediately after the
premiere in 1937, he wrote to the
Schott company in Munich, which
had been his publisher for a full
decade: “Everything I have written
to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed.
With Carmina Burana my collected
works begin.”
Before the premiere of Carmina
Burana in 1937, Orff’s career had
proceeded nicely, if routinely, on
Composed
1935–1936
First performance
June 8, 1937 (staged),
Frankfurt Opera
First CSO
performance
March 17, 1955, Orchestra
Hall. Lois Marshall, Leslie
Chabay, Morley Meredith as
soloists; The Concert Choir;
Fritz Reiner conducting
Most recent
CSO performances
January 31, 1995, Orchestra
Hall. Janet Williams, Frank
Lopardo, Boje Skovhus
as soloists; Chicago
Symphony Chorus; Chicago
Children’s Chorus; Zubin
Mehta conducting
track. His infatuation with music
began at an early age—he took
music lessons and composed songs
as a young child—and at the age of
four he became enchanted with the
theater during a traditional Punch
and Judy show. He was essentially
self-taught. At fourteen he heard
his first opera, Wagner’s The Flying
Dutchman; it started an avalanche,
as Orff later recalled. The young
composer’s grandfather kept a
notebook in which he recorded
the progress of Carl’s musical
education: Wagner’s entire Ring
cycle and Tristan and Isolde, the
July 23, 2004, Ravinia
Festival. Harolyn Blackwell,
Donald Kaasch, Rodney
Gilfry as soloists; Chicago
Symphony Chorus; Glen
Ellyn Children’s Chorus;
James Conlon conducting
Instrumentation
three solo voices (soprano,
tenor or countertenor,
and baritone), large mixed
chorus, small mixed chorus,
children’s chorus, three
flutes and two piccolos,
three oboes and english
horn, three clarinets, E-flat
clarinet and bass clarinet,
two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones
and tuba, timpani, three
glockenspiels, xylophone,
castanets, ratchet, small
bells, triangle, antique
cymbals, crash cymbals,
suspended cymbal, tam-tam,
tubular bells, tambourine,
snare drum, bass drum,
celesta, two pianos, strings
Approximate
performance time
60 minutes
CSO recording
1984. June Anderson,
Philip Creech, Bernd
Weikl as soloists; Chicago
Symphony Chorus; Glen
Ellyn Children’s Chorus;
James Levine conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
7
principal Mozart operas, Strauss’s
Salome and Elektra. By the age of
seventeen, Orff had composed some
sixty songs, which revealed the
unmistakable influence of Debussy
and early Schoenberg. (He was
particularly taken with Schoenberg’s
Five Pieces for Orchestra, and he
made a piano duet arrangement of
his Chamber Symphony.) Orff’s
interests were wide—he studied the
great Renaissance and baroque masters as well as African music—and
he eventually composed in a number
of forms. The catalog he asked
Schott to destroy in 1937 included
an operatic treatment of the
Japanese play Terakoya, a symphony
based on the poetry of Maurice
Maeterlinck, and choral settings
of texts by Franz Werfel (Orff’s
favorite writer) and Bertold Brecht.
Carmina Burana marked a shift
Carl Orff and Riccardo Muti backstage
following the performance of Carmina Burana
in Berlin, 1980
in direction. It was Orff’s first
attempt at total theater—a combination of music, word, movement, and visual spectacle—and
8
his earliest essay in a potent and
accessible musical style designed to
engage listeners who had lost their
way in the complexities of twentieth-century music, although it was
Orff more than anyone who found
his way as a result of the piece. The
work was wildly popular at once,
and its exceptional appeal has never
waned. After Carmina Burana, Orff
did not tamper with his formula:
he composed virtually nothing
but vocal works for the stage—
few are operas in the traditional
sense—that place a high value on
simplicity of musical language and
directness of expression. At its
most extreme, as in Die Bernauerin,
composed in 1947, Orff’s output
hardly resembles music as we know
it: spoken word alternates with
rhythmic chanting; notated pitch is
virtually nonexistent.
The life-changing idea of composing Carmina Burana began in
a rare book shop in Würzburg on
Maundy Thursday in 1934, when
Orff’s eye fell upon a collection of
medieval poems. The texts—most
of them are in Latin, but a few
are Middle High German and
French—celebrate springtime, love,
and the varied pleasures of a full, if
self-indulgent, life. The tone, however, is dark, even bitter. (The very
first poem in the collection, and the
one Orff chose for his opening and
closing chorus, ends: “Weep with
me.”) These songs—Orff was not
aware that melodies for these texts
also existed—had been preserved
for centuries in the Benedikbeuern
monastery in the foothills of the
Bavarian Alps thirty miles south
of Munich. In the early nineteenth
century, the manuscript was
transferred to Munich, and in 1847,
selections were published by Johann
Andreas Schmeller, the Munich
court librarian. (Schmeller also was
a self-appointed censor: he omitted
the raciest numbers.) Schmeller’s
title, Carmina—the accent is on the
first syllable—Burana, means “songs
of Bavaria.” (Beueren, the site of the
Benedictine monastery, is a variant
of Bayern, the German name for
Bavaria.) It was Schmeller’s edition
that Orff picked up during an
afternoon of fortuitous browsing.
“On opening the first page,”
Orff later remembered, “I found
the familiar image of Fortune
with her wheel, and under it the
lines ‘O Fortuna velut Luna statu
variabilis . . . (O fortune, like the
moon ever-changing).’ Picture and
words seized hold of me.” That
very day he sketched the opening
chorus, with its great, inexorable
wheel of fate. Orff picked twentyfour poems, already imagining
a stage piece with chorus and
dancers, and, with the help of poet
Michael Hofmann, he arranged a
libretto. He composed the music
quickly, in a single burst of inspiration; visitors to his Munich apartment recall the red-faced excitement with which he played finished
numbers for them at the piano.
The title page of Orff’s Carmina
Burana promises “secular songs to
be sung by singers and choruses
to the accompaniment of instruments and also of magic pictures.”
Although the premiere, at the
Frankfurt Opera House, was staged
and costumed, and magic pictures
accompanied many early performances, Carmina Burana is best
known today through concerts and
recordings, where the immediacy
Carmina Burana
Fortune, Empress of
the World
1. O Fortuna (chorus)
2. Fortune plango vulnera
(chorus)
I. Springtime
3. Veris leta facies (small
chorus)
4. Omnia Sol temperat
(baritone)
5. Ecce gratum (chorus)
On the Green
6. Dance (orchestra)
7. Floret silva (chorus)
8. Chramer, gip die varwe
mir (chorus)
9. Reie (orchestra)
Swaz hie gat umbe
(chorus)
10. Were diu werlt alle min
(chorus)
II. In the Tavern
11. Estuans interius
(baritone)
12. Olim lacus colueram
(countertenor and
male chorus)
13. Ego sum abbas (baritone
and male chorus)
14. In taberna quando sumus
(male chorus)
III. The Courts of Love
15. Amor volat undique
(soprano and
children’s choir)
16. Dies, nox et omnia
(baritone)
17. Stetit puella (soprano)
18. Circa mea pectora
(baritone and chorus)
19. Si puer cum puella (male
soloists)
20. Veni, veni, venias (double
chorus)
21. In trutina (soprano)
22. Tempus est iocundum
(soprano, baritone,
chorus, and
children’s choir)
23. Dulcissime (soprano)
Blanziflor and
Helena
24. Ave formosissima
(chorus)
Fortune, Empress of
the World
25. O Fortuna (chorus)
9
© 2012 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
10
and physical excitement of Orff’s
music stand alone.
Orff’s score has sometimes
been criticized for popularizing
the musical style of Stravinsky’s
landmarks Oedipus rex and, in particular, Les noces. Orff was attracted
to the most superficial aspects of
those Stravinsky scores, such as the
glittering and percussive orchestral
writing (Les noces is scored for four
pianos, Carmina Burana calls for
two), the idea of giving the central
narrative role to the chorus, and the
prominent use of insistent rhythms.
But where Stravinsky achieves a
certain complexity of style and idea,
Orff intentionally keeps his music
stripped to its bones. In Carmina
Burana, he avoids complicated
rhythm and harmony (several numbers subsist on a steady diet of two
chords), and eschews polyphony
altogether. His melodies are plain
and syllabic. Occasionally, a single
driving rhythmic pattern alone
keeps the music going. (Imagine
the courage it must have taken to
write a pit-band oom-pah accompaniment in 1935.) Despite the spartan recipe, Orff succeeds brilliantly
because of his flair for dramatic
pacing, his ear for dazzling and
seductive color, the energy of his
rhythms, and the number of catchy
tunes he composed. The result is
a highly charged, expressive work
of undeniable power and immediacy—claims that can be made for
few pieces of serious music written
in the twentieth century.
Orff begins and ends with the
wheel of fate—a massive chorus
that slowly revolves around the
same relentless, unchanging
pattern, building in intensity and
volume as it goes. In between these
two pillars, he writes three large
chapters. The first celebrates springtime in a series of songs and dances.
The dance music is for orchestra
alone; the vocal pieces are scored for
baritone solo and various combinations of full chorus and small choir,
often singing in alternation. The
second section moves indoors to the
tavern—the exclusive province of
male voices and the temple of food
and drink. (The saga of the roasted
swan, sung by a wailing countertenor, is a marvel of exotic color.)
In the sensuous music of the third
section, set in the courts of love,
we hear the solo soprano and the
voices of children for the first time.
Almost all of these nine pieces are
scored for different vocal forces,
and the final sequence of numbers
is swift and dramatic. From a
rowdy, swinging chorus (no. 20,
for split choirs), Orff turns to the
soprano, who is lost in thought as
she vacillates between chastity and
physical love (a measured monologue, set in the soprano’s lowest
range). Encouraged by the baritone
and choruses, she makes her choice,
suddenly soaring to the highest
reaches of the soprano voice. The
music erupts in a magnificent hymn
of praise (“Noble Venus, hail”), and
the circle starts over as the wheel of
fate begins to spin once again. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
For Riccardo Muti’s account of his
meeting with Carl Orff, see pages 4–5.
Supertitles by Sonya Friedman © 2012
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