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 12, 2016, at 8:00 Saturday, May 14, 2016, at 8:00

Charles Dutoit ConductorJavier Perianes PianoDaniela Mack Mezzo-soprano

RavelAlborada del gracioso

FallaNights in the Gardens of SpainIn the GeneralifeDistant Dance—In the Gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba

JAVIER PERIANES

INTERMISSION

DukasThe Sorcerer’s Apprentice

FallaThe Three-Cornered HatIntroductionPart One

AfternoonDance of the Miller’s Wife (Fandango)The Grapes

Part TwoThe Neighbors’ Dance (Seguidilla)The Miller’s Dance (Farruca)The Corregidor’s Dance

Final Dance (Jota)DANIELA MACK

The appearances of Daniela Mack and Javier Perianes are endowed in part by the John Ward Seabury Distinguished Soloist Fund.

Saturday’s concert is sponsored by S&C Electric Company.

This work is part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective, which is generously sponsored by the Sargent Family Foundation.

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

Maurice RavelBorn March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.

Alborada del gracioso

Maurice Ravel was born in the French Pyrenees, only a few miles from the Spanish border, a geo-graphical boundary he often crossed in his music. Even though his family moved to Paris while he was still a baby, Ravel came by his fascination

with Spain naturally, for his mother was Basque and grew up in Madrid. (His Swiss father inspired in his son a love for things precise and mechanical that carried over into his impeccable music, provoking Stravinsky to dismiss him as a “Swiss watchmaker.”)

In 1905, Ravel composed a set of five piano pieces he called Miroirs (Mirrors), which included some of the earliest of the Spanish music he wrote from the comfort of his Paris apartment. Alborada del gracioso, one of the three pieces which he later transcribed for full orchestra, immediately became one of his most popular works. The original piano version, with its impos-sibly fast repeated notes (it remains a challenge to all but the most skilled pianists), is so rich and evocative that orchestrating it must have seemed

redundant at first. But, perhaps more than any musician of his time, Ravel had an extraordinary ear for sonority and color. The newly redecorated Alborada is one of his greatest sonic achievements.

A lborada means morning music, just as serenade means night music. It’s related to the French aubade and the

troubadour’s alba (literally “white of dawn”), by which means lovers are warned of the approach-ing dawn in time to dampen their passions and part company. (This requires the participation of a loyal watchman or friend—like Brangäne in Tristan and Isolde, whose warnings are famously ignored.) In the more common Spanish tradi-tion, it’s simply any music performed at day-break, often to celebrate a festival or to honor a person—or both, such as a bride on her wedding day. To his Alborada, however, Ravel adds del gracioso, or “of the buffoon,” clouding the picture with the introduction of the standard grotesque lover, akin to Don Quixote of ancient Castilian comedy. And so we have a highly spirited, almost outrageous dance that begins with the strum-ming of a guitar (here given to the pizzicato strings and the harp) and concluding with a grand and glorious racket.

COMPOSED1905, for piano; orchestrated in 1918

FIRST PERFORMANCEMay 17, 1919; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 6 & 7, 1925, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

July 15, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Willem van Hoogstraten conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 26, 1990, Ravinia Festival. Gianluigi Gelmetti conducting

February 27, 28 & March 1, 2014, Orchestra Hall. Marcelo Lehninger conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, crotales, triangle, tambourine, castanets, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, xylophone, two harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME7 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1968. Jean Martinon conducting. RCA

1991. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Erato

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Manuel de FallaBorn November 23, 1876, Cádiz, Spain.Died November 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain

COMPOSED1909–15

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 9, 1916; Madrid, Spain

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESDecember 11 & 12, 1925, Orchestra Hall. Rudolph Reuter as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting

July 14, 1949, Ravinia Festival. William Kapell as soloist, Fritz Reiner conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESAugust 2, 1996, Ravinia Festival. Alicia de Larrocha as soloist, Christoph Eschenbach conducting

May 31, June 1, 2 & 5, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Stewart Goodyear as soloist, Ludovic Morlot conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo piano, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle, celesta, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME23 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1997. Daniel Barenboim as soloist, Plácido Domingo conducting. Teldec

1997. Daniel Barenboim as soloist, Plácido Domingo conducting. Arthaus Musik (video)

In 1921, when he was the most celebrated Spanish composer alive, Falla settled in Granada, in a cottage surrounded by roses, honeysuckle, and jasmine, with an arbor and a small fountain. At the top of a nearby hill sat the great Alhambra—the

fortress of the Moorish kings that Falla had famously drawn in music in his Nights in the Gardens of Spain. At the time he began the score, more than a decade earlier, Falla was living in Paris and had never even been to Granada; he knew about the Alhambra only from an inexpen-sive book he bought at a bookstall on the rue de Richelieu. (He was so captivated that he stayed up all night reading it.)

Nights in the Gardens of Spain began as a set of nocturnes for solo piano. Falla started sketching in 1909, the year his colleague Isaac Albéniz died, depriving Spain of one of its best-known composers. (When Enrique Granados died in 1916, less than a month before the premiere of Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Falla was thrust into his new role as the country’s preeminent composer.) Ricardo Viñes, the great Catalan pianist who introduced many of Debussy’s and

Ravel’s works, suggested that Falla turn the nocturnes into a piece for piano with orchestra. Falla took his recommendation to heart, but this change in direction further delayed completion of the score. As Falla became better known in Paris, particularly after the success of his opera La vida breve in 1913, the long-awaited work became legendary in the city’s music circles.

When Falla fled to Spain as war broke out in August 1914 (he was in such a hurry to catch a train that he lost his toupee en route) the noc-turnes, now called Nights in the Gardens of Spain, were still unfinished. Shortly after returning to his homeland, Falla visited the Alhambra for the first time, in the company of his friend Maria Martínez Sierra, who noticed his “satisfaction at having guessed, with the help of some book, the charm which he had never seen before.”

After settling briefly in Madrid, Falla lived for several months in the beach town of Sitges, near Barcelona, where he put the finishing touches on Nights in the Gardens of Spain. He worked on an old, out-of-tune piano in El Cau Ferrat, the home of the popular painter Santiago Rusiñol, fine-tuning his sense of orchestral color in a house filled with his host’s evocative canvases of Spanish gardens. (It was once believed, errone-ously, that these paintings were the inspiration for the score.)

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N ights in the Gardens of Spain is neither a concerto, although it’s scored for a solo piano with orchestra, nor a tone poem,

even though it vividly portrays the spirit of a place. Falla referred to it simply as “symphonic impressions.” The piano role, prominent but rarely dominant, is characterized by elaborate, brilliant, and eloquent writing. (Falla’s piano teacher studied with a pupil of Chopin.) The score is dedicated to Viñes, who didn’t play the first performance, but, like the composer himself, often performed the work in public in later years. The orchestral writing is lush but never excessive; it’s Falla’s most “impressionistic” (and arguably his most “French”) score, and as an evocation of atmosphere and setting, it ranks with Debussy’s and Ravel’s greatest symphonic works.

Falla depicts three gardens. The first is the cel-ebrated Generalife, the jasmine-scented gardens surrounding the summer palace of the king’s harem at the Alhambra. (The word “Generalife” comes from the Moorish “Jennat al Arif ”—the builder’s garden.) “Nowhere,” wrote Alexander Dumas, “were so many orange trees, so many roses, so many jasmines gathered in so small a place . . . . Nowhere will you see so many springs, so many leaping waterfalls, so many

rushing torrents.” And they’re all gathered here in Falla’s wondrously evocative and fragrant music.

The second movement, set in an unidentified distant garden, is an exotic dance. The piano, with its arabesques, trills, arpeggios, and stomping octaves, suggests a guitar, then a dancer, and later a singer. Without pause, Falla transports us to festivities in the Sierra de Córdoba. Music historians like to attribute this brilliant finale to the zambra gitano—a night festival characterized by lively gypsy dancing and singing traditionally held for the feast of Corpus Christi. But Falla,

no fan of explicit program music, didn’t care to be pinned down. As he wrote:

If these “symphonic impressions” have achieved their object, the mere enumeration of their titles should be a significant guide to the hearer. Although in this work—as in all which have a legitimate claim to be consid-ered as music—the composer has followed a definite design regarding tonal, rhythmical, and thematic material . . . the end for which it was written is no other than to evoke places, sensations, and sentiments.

The themes employed are based (as is much of the composer’s earlier work) on the rhythms, modes, cadences, and ornamental figures which distinguish the popular music of Andalusia, though they are rarely used in their original forms; and the orchestra frequently employs, and employs in a conventional manner, certain effects peculiar to the popular instruments used in those parts of Spain. The music has no pretensions to being descriptive; it is merely expressive. But something more than the sounds of festivals and dances has inspired these “evocations in sound,” for melancholy and mystery also have their part.

Granada’s Alhambra, with the Sierra Nevada in the background

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Paul DukasBorn October 1, 1865, Paris, France.Died May 17, 1935, Paris, France.

The Sorcerer’s ApprenticePerformed as part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective

COMPOSED1897

FIRST PERFORMANCEMay 18, 1897; Paris, France. The composer conducting

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJanuary 13 & 14, 1899, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conduct-ing (U.S. premiere)

July 10, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Hans Lange conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESNovember 23, 24 & 25, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Ludwig Wicki conducting

July 12, 2015, Ravinia Festival. Ted Sperling conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME10 minutes

CSO RECORDING1968. Jean Martinon conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 12: A Tribute to Jean Martinon)

“This interesting novelty is by a composer little known to the musical world and whose name now appears for the first time on the programs of these con-certs,” were the words that introduced this music when Theodore Thomas conducted the U.S.

premiere of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Chicago on January 13, 1899. The orchestral scherzo quickly became an audience favorite—the Chicago Symphony played it nearly every season in the first decades of the twentieth century—and with the 1940 release of Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse gives technicolor life to each gesture in Dukas’s score and the poem by Goethe on which it is based, Dukas’s novelty became one of the best known of all symphonic works.

Although he lived a long life in good health, Dukas left only seven major compositions, each a single example in a different genre—an overture (Polyeucte, his first published work), a symphony, a piano sonata, a set of piano variations, one opera (Ariane et Barbe-Bleu), the ballet score for La péri, and the tone poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Those works span just two decades of Dukas’s nearly seventy years. La péri is the last of

them; although he lived nearly another quarter century, Dukas composed very little during those years and destroyed virtually everything he wrote. (Among Dukas’s projected and discarded works are three operas, including a Tempest drawn from Shakespeare.)

Dukas was a fiercely self-critical and fastidi-ous craftsman, an exemplary orchestrator, and an adventuresome musical thinker. Despite the brevity of his career and the paucity of his compositions, he managed to wield a certain influence. Although the theatrics of a work like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are overly familiar today, both Stravinsky and Debussy were quite taken with the piece at the time of its premiere in 1897, and admired his later music as well. Debussy wrote an effusive review of Dukas’s piano sonata when it appeared in 1901, and later said it was worthy of standing alongside Beethoven’s—it was the only one that was “representative of our time.” Stravinsky dropped an almost literal quotation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in his 1908 orchestral piece, Fireworks. (Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique, written the previous year, is also indebted to Dukas.)

T he essence of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the same in Goethe’s ballad Der Zauberlehrling, in Dukas’s scherzo, and

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in Disney’s animation. A magician’s apprentice has observed his master’s ability to bring a broomstick to life in order to do the sorcerer’s bidding. Left on his own, the apprentice orders the broomstick to fetch water, only to realize that he has no power to stop it. As the magician’s house begins to overflow with water, the apprentice tries to avoid disaster by chopping the broom in half, which merely produces two brooms and even more water. Only with the return of the sorcerer himself, and a masterful wave of his hand, is the disaster stopped and calm restored. As the Chicago Orchestra’s program annotator Hubbard William Harris wrote in 1899,

Dukas’s composition is, as its name signifies, in a single movement and is constructed from thematic mate-rial so easily grasped as to require neither quotation nor extended explanation. . . . The instrumen-tation is exceedingly rich and effective and in point of difficulty of execution the work stands side by side with the brilliant composi-tions of Strauss, d’Indy, and other modern writers.

The program for January 13 and 14, 1899—including the U.S. premiere of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, conducted by Theodore Thomas—had to be revised at the last minute. Bruno Steindel, the Orchestra’s principal cello, originally was scheduled to be soloist in Raff’s Cello Concerto; however, he canceled due to illness and Chabrier’s “interesting novelty,” the composer’s Suite pastorale, replaced the concerto.

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COMPOSED1918–19, as a revision of the panto-mime El corregidor y la molinera of 1916–17

FIRST PERFORMANCEJuly 22, 1919, in London’s Alhambra Theater by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 23 & 24, 1923, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting (Suite no. 2)

July 10, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest Ansermet conducting (Suite no. 2)

June 7 & 8, 1973, Orchestra Hall. Teresa Orantes as soloist, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESSeptember 21 & 23, 2003, Orchestra Hall. Susanne Mentzer as soloist, William Eddins conducting

June 20, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Edwin Outwater conducting (Suite no. 2)

July 17, 2015, Ravinia Festival. Michelle DeYoung as soloist, Carlos Miguel Prieto conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONfemale vocal soloist, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle,

castanets, tam-tam, xylophone, harp, celesta, piano, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME38 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1997. Jennifer Larmore as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec

2001. Elisabéte Matos as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting. EuroArts (video)

Manuel de Falla

The Three-Cornered Hat

One of music’s great international collaborative efforts, The Three-Cornered Hat began life in 1916 as a modest pantomime called El corregidor y la molinera (The magistrate and the miller’s wife). (The 1875 novel by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, on

which it’s based, also is the source for Hugo Wolf ’s 1896 opera Der Corregidor.) Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes were visiting Madrid during the initial run of El corregidor, and the impresario asked Falla to transform it into a ballet, expanded and rescored for large orchestra. (Diaghilev had been urging Falla to write something for his troupe for years—at one point, they talked seriously about producing Nights in the Gardens of Spain as a ballet.) In no time, Diaghilev put together an extraordinary cast of characters for Falla’s ballet, with Léonide Massine as choreographer and Pablo Picasso as designer.

To help devise the choreography, Massine took flamenco lessons from Felix Fernandez Garcia, a phenomenal dancer whom Diaghilev found in a working-class café in the back streets of Madrid and persuaded to join the company as the star of the new ballet. (Massine also admitted to finding

many beautiful poses in bullfighting.) Picasso designed sets and costumes that were character-istically witty and brilliant, and devised a front drop curtain depicting a bullfight in ochre, pale pink, white, blue, and gray that was so magnif-icent that Falla wrote some new music at the last minute just to show it off. (Picasso finished painting the curtain during final rehearsals.)

Shortly before the premiere, Garcia became ill and Massine had to take over his role. And on the afternoon of the first performance, Falla was summoned by telegram back to Madrid to his mother’s deathbed, and Ernest Ansermet stepped in to conduct. But The Three-Cornered Hat was a triumph, and Massine later said that of his more than one hundred ballets, it was the one of which he was most proud. (He continued to dance the role of the miller into the 1950s.) Misia Sert gave a post-premiere party at which Rubinstein played the piano and Picasso drew a laurel crown on the composer’s bald head with his hostess’s eyebrow pencil. (Incidentally, The Three-Cornered Hat was the last ballet danced by Diaghilev’s com-pany, on August 4, 1929, a fortnight before the impresario’s death.)

T he Three-Cornered Hat begins with the brief introduction Falla added to show off Picasso’s curtain—a minute or so of

pounding drums and sizzling castanets (used

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so sparingly elsewhere in the score), as trumpet fanfares and shouts of “olé” set off a young woman’s warning:

Casadita, casadita, Little wife, little wife, cierra con tranca fasten your door with la puerta; a bar; que aunque el diablo even if the devil is esté dormido asleep now, !a lo mejor se when you least expect despierta! it he’ll wake up!

Afternoon. The miller tries to teach his pet blackbird to imitate the striking of a clock. (The bird resists until the miller’s wife bribes him with grapes.) The miller draws water for the garden (the wheel squeaks noisily, in the piccolos and violins). A dandy passes by and flirts with the miller’s beautiful wife. The corregidor, wearing the huge three-cornered hat that is his badge of office, now enters.

Dance of the Miller’s Wife. Pretending not to notice the corregidor, the miller’s wife dances a fandango. He tries to get her attention by bowing to the ground (a low-lying bassoon solo). She curtsies, to seductive string chords.

The Grapes. The miller’s wife teases the corregidor with a bunch of grapes held just out of reach. Humiliated, he storms off while the miller and his wife continue the fandango.

The Neighbors’ Dance. That evening, Saint John’s Eve, the neighbors celebrate by dancing a seguidilla (Falla refashions a gypsy song from Granada).

The Miller’s Dance. The miller begins to dance. In his memoirs, Massine recalls:

I began by stamping my feet repeatedly and twirling my hands over my head. As the music quickened I did a series of high jumps, ending with a turn in mid-air and a

savage stamp of the foot as I landed. . . . The mental image of an enraged bull going into the attack unleashed some inner force which generated power within me. . . . For one moment it seemed as if some other person within me was performing the dance.

A knock at the door—parodying the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—announces soldiers who have come to arrest the miller, on the corregidor’s orders. Once again, a female voice sounds a warning:

Por la noche canta el The cuckoo sings in cuco the night advirtiendo a los warning husbands casados que corran bien los to fasten their latches cerrojos as well, !que el diable esta for the devil is desvelado! vigilant!

The cuckoo clock strikes nine (answered by the learned blackbird).

The Corregidor’s Dance. The corregidor, thinking himself a true Don Juan, approaches and dances a courtly number. In the dark, he falls into the mill stream. The miller returns to find the corregidor’s clothes hung up to dry, misconstrues the evidence, puts on his rival’s outfit, and sets off to try his luck with the corregidor’s wife.

Final Dance. The finale, propelled by mistaken identities and general confusion, eventually ends happily, with the miller and his wife reunited. The villagers toss the corregidor into the air, and every-one joins in the jota, a wild dance from Aragon.

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

© 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra