CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 8:00 PM

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor Emeritus
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano
Tamara Stefanovich, Piano

PIERRE BOULEZ Livre pour cordes
BARTÓK Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion, and Orchestra

STRAVINSKY The Firebird (complete)

Program is approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes, including one intermission

Program Notes:

PIERRE BOULEZ (b. 1925)

Livre pour cordes

A short piece for strings, Livre pour cordes offers us a disproportionately expansive view of Boulez’s output. For one thing, it takes us to two very different points in his career, starting in the late 1940s, when his radical views and bracing early works breathed new life into the music scene. (Like many mathematicians—and mathematics was one of Boulez’s first interests—Boulez made his mark while he was still in his early 20s.)

The world of music was a relatively staid and uneventful place in the 1940s; after 1945, when it lost two of its greatest pioneers—Webern and Bartók—it seemed particularly bereft of visionaries. The two aging giants of the early century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, were still writing music, although Stravinsky was stuck in the neoclassic mode he had been perfecting for two decades and Schoenberg was at something of a standstill, his output diminished by poor health and bad eyesight.

Boulez arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1943 to study music, and the following September he began to work privately with Olivier Messiaen, who had made his name before the war as the composer of several striking and idiosyncratic works. (His wartime masterpiece, Quatuor pour la fin du temps, brought him renewed fame.) Boulez was not a student for long—that is, his singular, independent musical personality quickly emerged—and, with a string of compositions in the late 1940s, he rapidly staked his claim as one of the truly original musical thinkers of the time. The 12 short Notations for piano that he composed in 1945 (later withdrawn and later still reexplored in versions for full orchestra) are among the earliest of these works. By the time of the Livre pour quatuor, a “book for quartet” composed in 1948 and 1949, Boulez had more than fulfilled the promise he later said any teacher must expect of a student: “Throw away the book I have taught you to read and add a new, wholly unexpected page!” This radical new Livre is the genesis of the Livre pour cordes—the “book for strings” performed at this concert.

Livre pour quatuor foreshadowed much of Boulez’s development as a composer, and it also stood as a refutation of all that was passé and predictable in music at the time. Livre, in its first version for string quartet, is a collection of six movements (although the fourth was never published) that can be played in any order. (It predates the many scores of the 1950s and ’60s that leave the sequence of movements to the players.) It is an answer to the advances of earlier pioneering composers of quartets, from Beethoven to Bartók. Taking the last works of Anton Webern and the brand new Four Rhythmic Etudes of Messiaen as more immediate points of departure, in certain movements Boulez began to explore the idea of “total serialism,” where not only the pitch, but the duration, intensity, and timbre of each sound is governed by the rules of serialism. The work was introduced piecemeal over time from 1955 to 1962—among the earliest of Boulez’s works to yield a series of premieres—and was then withdrawn by the composer, partly because of its extreme demands on the players.

By 1968, when Boulez returned to the Livre, he was no longer a young rebel, but a distinguished leader of the avant-garde. His founding of the Domaine Musical concerts in Paris in 1954 had set up an important dialogue between contemporary composers and “a public interested in its own century.” And the premiere in 1955 of his Le Marteau sans maître (“the hammer with no master”)—an instant classic—established him as an undisputed master in his own right. Beginning in the early 1960s, Boulez also emerged as a significant orchestral conductor. (His Bayreuth debut, conducting Parsifal in 1966, was a brilliant success.) Pli selon pli (“fold upon fold”) for soprano and orchestra—a setting of texts by Mallarmé dating from 1962—was immediately recognized as a landmark in the complex landscape of post-war music.

Boulez had been planning to revise Livre pour quatuor for some time. In 1968, he set out to completely reconsider the work, now recasting it for full string orchestra. The new Livre pour cordes was never just a practical renovation—simply spreading the players’ difficulties over a large ensemble, for example—but instead a total overhaul, allowing Boulez to explore every implication of his earlier score. The original quartet was not so much expanded as exploded into a work of intricacy, depth, and surpassing textural beauty. (The distance traveled is not as great as that of Notations, which blossomed from 12-measure pieces for solo piano to much bigger structures for large orchestra, but the kind of journey undertaken is of a similar, transformative nature.)

This kind of reexamination and amplification of an early work has become a hallmark of Boulez’s output. He is a master at considering a single musical idea from every point of view—and creating a body of exquisite, ever-richer, often distantly related works in the process. Although Boulez has moved through distinct phases in his work—so-called total serialism in the early 1950s, for example, or the more recent fusion of electronics with traditional instruments—essential ideas and preoccupations run through his output, linking past and present. As Boulez said in an interview with Jean-Pierre Derrien, “There is no doubt that my world is now more elaborate than it was before. It is basically the same with Proust, where the beginning and end of A la recherche du temps perdu are clearly by the same writer, but the whole nature and outline of the developments are different.”

In 1968, Boulez introduced the new Livre pour cordes in London. (It has two parts: 1a, Variation, and 1b, Movement.) In the meantime, he withdrew the original version for string quartet. Twenty years later, Boulez returned to this long-running work in progress, and revised Livre yet again, in the process making one movement of the two parts. At the moment, therefore, the piece performed at this concert is the only remnant of the original Livre in the repertory—the sole extant “chapter” from the large book Boulez began some 60 years ago.



BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945)

Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion, and Orchestra

This is the last music Béla Bartók played in public. He and his second wife, Ditta, gave the US premiere of this singularly scored concerto in New York, their new hometown, in January 1943, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Fritz Reiner.

Bartók began his career as a pianist; by all accounts, he was a formidable talent—his name would still figure in the history of 20th-century music even if he hadn’t gone on to a more brilliant career as a composer. His first and second piano concertos, composed in 1926 and 1930, respectively, were both written for his appearances in orchestral concerts, and both were impressive showpieces for his keyboard technique. When he was commissioned to compose a new work following the successful 1937 premiere of his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, in Basel, Switzerland, Bartók decided to write a new work to play—this time in tandem with his wife. Their concert debut as a piano team took place on January 16, 1938, with the premiere of the new piece for Basel—a sonata for the unprecedented combination of two pianos and two percussion players.

From his piano concertos, Bartók realized that although the piano is, technically, a percussion instrument—a member of the extended family of instruments that make sounds when struck—it had seldom been showcased in that context. “For some time now,” he wrote in the Basler National Zeitung, “I have been planning to compose a work for piano and percussion. Slowly, however, I have become convinced that one piano does not sufficiently balance the frequently very sharp sounds of the percussion.” The two-piano sonata was his response—a way to properly balance the piano
with other percussion instruments, to revitalize his own performing career, and, in the process, to cement marital (if not musical) harmony.

The sonata is a quartet for four virtuoso musicians (the demands are so great that six percussionists were used in one early performance), focusing exclusively on the piano-percussion interaction that had been one of the salient features of both piano concertos. The sonata explores the world of percussion—from the pitched xylophone and tuned timpani to the unpitched rhythmic patterns of the cymbals and drums—with a curiosity, subtlety, and vision new to music at the time.

Sometime after the Basel premiere, Bartók said that “the whole thing sounds quite unusual—but the Basel people like it anyway [and] it had a tremendous success.” That was not the case at the second performance, in Budapest, where Bartók’s page-turner was 26-year-old Georg Solti, who had gone to the concert eager to hear this provocative new score and ended up being recruited to turn pages for the composer. As Solti later recalled, speaking to the Women’s Association of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1988,

It was a printed score but very difficult to follow even at that point, so if you ask me what my first impression was—I don’t know ... I was too busy reading so I could turn the pages! But what I know—and that is an eternal shame for the very conservative Hungarian public who were at the Philharmonic concert—the success was really minimal.

Late in 1940, the Bartóks left Hungary to escape the Nazi invasion. They settled in New York City, after a tortuous journey through Europe and a rough crossing on an American cargo ship, with all their luggage left behind. In New York, with a spartan hotel room serving as their temporary home, Bartók realized that the only way for him to make a living was to continue his concert career. At the same time, Bartók’s new publisher, Ralph Hawkes—the enterprising head of Boosey and Hawkes—suggested that the sonata would reach a wider audience if it were turned into a concerto. Bartók set to work at once, making remarkably few changes to the musical content itself, yet so ingeniously translating the piece into a work for piano, percussion, and orchestra that one would never suspect its origins as chamber music.

Like the landmark Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta that precedes it, the concerto is one of Bartók’s greatest achievements. The work has three movements—the first nearly as long as the remaining two combined—that move from complexity and harmonic daring to pure, radiant exuberance. The opening movement is a grand architectural achievement, unfolding mysteriously at first over the stirrings of a single timpani—Bartók’s students said he described the opening as the creation of a cosmos evolving out of formlessness and timelessness—and eventually settling into music of combustive energy and powerful rhythmic drive. The middle movement is pure night music, both edgy and dreamy, filled with the suggestive sounds of nature, as well as sonorities Bartók alone knew existed. In light of all that has gone before, the robust finale has the lilt of simple folk music.

The “new” concerto was premiered in London in November 1942, without the Bartóks at the keyboard. The composer and his wife were the soloists for the US premiere the following year, reuniting them with music intended for their hands from the start, and, at the same time, bringing an end to Bartók’s public career as a pianist. When Bartók composed his third concerto for piano in 1945—the last score he completed before he died—he wrote it not for his own hands, but as a birthday gift for Ditta.



IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)

The Firebird

The Firebird opened on June 25, 1910; on June 26, Stravinsky was a famous man. The great impresario Sergei Diaghilev had predicted as much; at one of the final dress rehearsals he pointed to Stravinsky and said, “Mark him well; he is a man on the eve of celebrity.” Diaghilev was a good judge of such things, for in 1910 his circle included many of the most famous creative artists of the time. He was perhaps excessively proud, for he had discovered Igor Stravinsky—or, to be more accurate, he was the one who put Stravinsky in the right place at the right time. The rest was all Stravinsky’s doing.

The right place was Paris in 1910. By chance, Diaghilev had heard Stravinsky’s music for the first time just two years before, at a concert in St. Petersburg. He immediately invited the 26-year-old composer to assist in orchestrating music for the 1909 ballet season in Paris. But Stravinsky owes his first international success to Nikolai Tcherepnin and Anatoly Liadov—both prominent, though modestly talented, Russian composers who declined Diaghilev’s offer to write music for The Firebird. (Richard Taruskin has debunked the beloved old story that Liadov, a famous procrastinator, initially accepted and then lost the job when Diaghilev learned that he was just stocking up on manuscript paper at the time the first installment of the score was due.)

The Firebird was a spectacular success. According to Ravel, the Parisian audience wanted a taste of the avant-garde, and this dazzling music by the daring young Russian fit the bill. The Firebird was Stravinsky’s first large-scale commission, and, being an overnight hit, it was quickly followed by two more. The first, Petrushka, enhanced his reputation; the second, The Rite of Spring, made him the most notorious composer alive.

Both of those works were more revolutionary than The Firebird—less indebted to folk melody and the gestures of other masters—and spoke in a voice of greater individuality. But The Firebird is one of the most impressive calling cards in the history of music—a work of such brilliance that, if he had written nothing else, Stravinsky’s name would still be known to us today.

Although Stravinsky later called the Firebird orchestra “wastefully large,” he used it with formidable clarity and imagination. “For me,” Stravinsky wrote, “the most striking effect in The Firebird was the natural-harmonic string glissando near the beginning, which the bass chord touches off like a catherine wheel. I was delighted to have discovered this, and I remember my excitement in demonstrating it to Rimsky’s violinist and cellist sons. I remember, too, Richard Strauss’s astonishment when he heard it two years later in Berlin.” The score is filled with delicious details, though none so novel as the one Stravinsky rightfully claimed as his own, and, in the closing pages, a magnificent sweep unmatched by much music written in the previous century and little since.

—Phillip Huscher



The Firebird: a synopsis of the complete ballet

Fokine’s adaptation of the fairy tale pits the Firebird, a good fairy, against the ogre Kashchei, whose soul is preserved as an egg in a casket. A young prince, Ivan Tsarevich, wanders into Kashchei’s magic garden in pursuit of the Firebird. When he captures her, she pleads for her release and gives him one of her feathers, whose magic will protect him from harm. He then meets 13 princesses, all under Kashchei’s spell, and falls in love with one of them. When he tries to follow them into the magic garden, a great carillon sounds an alarm and he is captured. Kashchei is about to turn Ivan to stone when the prince waves the feather; the Firebird appears. Her lullaby puts Kashchei to sleep, and she then reveals the secret of his immortality. Ivan opens the casket and smashes the egg, killing Kashchei. The captive princesses are freed, and Ivan and his beloved princess are betrothed.

More Information:

Three pictures in sound: Boulez gives us a line drawing, in a single color, using only strings; Bartók unfolds more colors of the orchestra, against the black and white of pianos and percussion; and Stravinsky pulls out all the stops, presenting a romantic extravaganza and using every shade in his rich orchestral palette to paint a picture of monstrous demons, heroic action, and a magical bird.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor Emeritus
Pierre Boulez, Conductor Emeritus

Appointed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus in 2006, composer-conductor Pierre Boulez is one of the most important musical and intellectual figures of our time. Mr. Boulez was named principal guest conductor of the CSO in March 1995. This year, the music world celebrates his 85th birthday.

Born in 1925 in Montbrison, France, Mr. Boulez studied piano, composition, and choral conducting at the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. In 1954, he founded the Concerts du Petit Marigny, one of the first concert series dedicated to modern music, which later became the Domaine Musical series. In the next decade, he was involved with musical analysis, and he taught in Darmstadt and at Basel University. In 1963, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and in 1976, he became a professor at the Collège de France.

Mr. Boulez began his conducting career in 1958 with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 1965, George Szell invited him to conduct in the US for the first time with the Cleveland Orchestra; he subsequently held posts there as principal guest conductor and musical advisor from 1969 until 1972. In 1971, he became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra; that same year, he became music director of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held until 1977.

His difference of opinion about state intervention in the arts in France led Mr. Boulez into voluntary exile for several years. He returned to France in 1974, when the government invited him to be creator and director of a music research center at the Pompidou Centre. From the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique sprang the creation of a major instrumental group, the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Mr. Boulez also is cofounder of Cité de la Musique, a music center in Paris created in 1995.

Mr. Boulez’s numerous compositions are widely performed, including Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli, three piano sonatas, Le Visage nuptial, Répons, . . . explosante-fixe . . . , and Notations. Mr. Boulez has published five books about music. His many awards and honors include honorary doctorates from Leeds, Cambridge, Basel, and Oxford universities, among others; Commander of the British Empire; Knight of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; and 26 Grammy awards.



Chicago Symphony Orchestra

In its second century, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra holds an enviable position in the music world, with performances greeted by enthusiastic audiences both at home and abroad.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra currently enjoys a unique leadership among international orchestras, with three of the world’s most celebrated conductors at its helm. Eminent Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink became principal conductor in 2006 and will conclude his successful tenure at the end of the 2009–2010 season. Renowned French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez—whose longstanding relationship with the CSO led to his appointment as principal guest conductor in 1995—was named Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus in 2006. In May 2008, Riccardo Muti was appointed the orchestra’s 10th music director. Maestro Muti currently serves as Music Director Designate, and will begin his tenure as Music Director in September 2010.

The CSO’s self-produced weekly radio program, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Radio Broadcast Series, hit the national airwaves in April 2007 and is now syndicated to more than 200 markets nationwide on the WFMT Radio Network. These broadcasts offer a new and distinctive approach to classical music radio, with lively and engaging content designed to provide deeper insight and offer further connection to the music performed in the Orchestra’s concert season.

Recordings have been an important part of the CSO’s activities. Since 1916, the orchestra has amassed a discography numbering more than 900. Recordings by the CSO have earned 60 Grammy Awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences—more than any other orchestra in the world. CSO Resound, the Orchestra’s in-house label for CD and digital download releases, was launched in May 2007. The CSO Resound recording of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony with Haitink, which includes a DVD Beyond the Score presentation, won the 2008 Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano

Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career that transcends traditional boundaries. Performing throughout the world each season with its most significant orchestras and conductors, in recent seasons Mr. Aimard also has been invited by Carnegie Hall, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Berliner Philharmoniker, Palais Garnier / Opéra de Paris, Lucerne Festival, Mozarteum Salzburg, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Cité de la Musique in Paris to devise groundbreaking “carte blanche” and residential projects, performing in chamber music, lieder, solo piano, and orchestral programs.

In 2009, Mr. Aimard assumed the title of Artistic Director at the Aldeburgh Festival, while continuing as Artistic Partner with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Through professorships at the Hochschule Köln and Conservatoire de Paris, as well as concert lectures and workshops worldwide, he sheds an inspiring and very personal light on music from all periods. In 2009 he gave a series of classes and seminars at the Collège de France.

He now records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, and his first DGG release, Bach’s Art of Fugue, received the Diapason d’Or and the Choc du Monde de la Musique, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s classical chart, and topped the classical album download chart on iTunes US. His recording of Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and songs with Susan Graham won a Grammy Award in 2005.

The recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist Award in spring 2005, Mr. Aimard was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year in 2007.

Born in Lyon, France, Pierre-Laurent Aimard studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Yvonne Loriod and in London with Maria Curcio. Early career landmarks included winning first prize in the 1973 Messiaen Competition and being appointed at age 19 by Pierre Boulez to become the Ensemble InterContemporain’s first solo pianist.

Tamara Stefanovich, Piano
Tamara Stefanovich, Piano

Tamara Stefanovich is a frequent performer at the world’s major concert venues including Carnegie Hall, the Cologne Philharmonie, Salzburg Mozarteum, Vienna Konzerthaus, Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet, and London’s Royal Festival and Wigmore halls. She has appeared at numerous international festivals such as Aldeburgh, La Roque d’Anthéron, Klangspuren, Lucerne, and Ojai.

Highlights of the current season include performances with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra under Eivind Aadland, London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski (at the BBC Proms), and the Britten Sinfonia under Pierre-Laurent Aimard. She also will present an All-Bach Partitas project and make her recital debut at the Concertgebouw in November 2010.

Ms. Stefanovich has led workshops and master classes at such centers as the Barbican in London, and she has participated in educational projects with the Philharmonie Cologne, Luxembourg Philharmonie, and at Klavier-Festival Ruhr. Ms. Stefanovich is also involved in creative projects such as collaborations with DJ Jimi Tenor and performances with actors and dance companies.

Ms. Stefanovich has made a number of recordings for the AVI label including a live recital of Rachmaninoff’s etudes and music by Ligeti as well as works by Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. She has presented premieres by Yörk Holler and Marco Stroppa.

Tamara Stefanovich started her piano education with Miroslava Lili Petrovi?. She gave her first public recital at the age of seven, and at the age of 13, she became the youngest student at the University of Belgrade. She received a master’s degree in piano at the age of 19. She continued her education at the Curtis Institute with Claude Frank, and subsequently studied with Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Cologne Hochschule, where she is on the faculty.