Due to health reasons, Daniel Barenboim unfortunately has withdrawn from the Staatskapelle Berlin’s North American tour. Jakub Hrůša has graciously agreed to lead the Staatskapelle Berlin in this concert.
N INET Y-THI R D SEASON
Tuesday, November 28, 2023, at 7:30
Orchestra Series STAATSKAPELLE BERLIN Jakub Hrůša Conductor MUSIC BY JOHANNES BRAHMS
Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 Allegro con brio Andante Poco allegretto Allegro INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 Un poco sostenuto—Allegro Andante sostenuto Un poco allegretto e grazioso Adagio—Allegro non troppo, ma con brio
This concert is generously sponsored by Sage Foundation.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association thanks
Sage Foundation
for generously sponsoring this performance.
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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 COMPOSED
1882–83
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 2, 1883; Vienna, Austria I N S T R U M E N TAT I O N
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings A P P R OX I M AT E P E R F O R M A N C E T I M E
40 minutes
It’s hard today to imagine that Brahms’s Third Symphony was once a challenging work of contemporary music. Yet several hundred people walked out of the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance in 1884, and the critic for the Boston Gazette called it “painfully dry, deliberate, and ungenial.” (It had been introduced to America a month before at one of Frank van der Stucken’s Novelty Concerts in New York.) Even when Brahms’s music was new, it was hardly radical. Brahms was concerned with writing music worthy of standing next to that by Beethoven; it was this fear that kept him from placing the double bar at the end of his
First Symphony for twenty years. Hugo Wolf, the adventuresome song composer, said, “Brahms writes symphonies regardless of what has happened in the meantime.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it touches on an important truth: Brahms was the first composer to develop successfully Beethoven’s rigorous brand of symphonic thinking. Hans Richter, a musician of considerable perception, called this F major symphony Brahms’s Eroica. There is certainly something Beethovenesque about the way the music is developed from the most compact material, although the parallel with the monumental, expansive Eroica is puzzling, aside from the opening tempo (Allegro con brio) and the fact that they are both third symphonies. Brahms’s Third Symphony is his shortest and his most tightly knit. Its substance came to him in a relatively sudden spurt: it was mostly written in less than four months—a flash of inspiration compared to the twenty years he spent on his First Symphony. Brahms was enjoying a trip to the Rhine at the time, and he quickly rented a place in Wiesbaden, where he could work in peace, and canceled his plans to
a b o v e : Johannes Brahms, ca. 1880, chalk drawing by Olga von Miller zu Aichholz (1853–1931)
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summer in Bad Ischl. The whole F major symphony was written nonstop. The benefit of such compressed work is a thematic coherence and organic unity rare even in Brahms. Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms on February 11, 1884, after having spent hours playing through the work in its two-piano version: “All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart.” Clara had been following Brahms’s career ever since the day he showed up at the door some thirty years earlier, asking to meet her famous husband, Robert. By 1884, Robert Schumann—Brahms’s first staunch advocate—was long dead, and Brahms’s on-again-off-again infatuation with Clara was off for good. But she was still a dear friend, a musician of great insight, and a keen judge of his work.
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urely, in trying to get her hands around the three massive chords with which Brahms begins, Clara noted in the top voice the rising F, A-flat, F motif that had become Brahms’s monogram for frei aber froh (free but joyful), an optimistic response to the motto of his friend Joseph Joachim, frei aber einsam (free but lonely). It is one of the few times in Brahms’s music that the notes mean something beyond themselves. That particular motif can be pointed out again and again throughout the symphony—it’s the bass line for the violin melody that follows in measures three and four, for example. Clara also can’t have missed the continual shifting back and forth from A-natural to A-flat, starting with the first three chords and again in the very first phrase of Brahms’s cascading violin melody. Since the half step from A-natural down to A-flat darkens F major into F minor, the
f r o m l e f t: Pastel drawing of pianist and composer Clara Schumann (1819–1896), 1878–79, by Franz von Lenbach (1836–1904) | Brahms’s summer lodgings outside Bad Ischl, Austria, ca. 1890
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preeminence of F major isn’t so certain in this music, even though we already know from the title that it will win in the end. In four measures (and as many seconds), Brahms has laid his cards on the table. In the course of this movement and those that follow, we could trace, with growing fascination, the progress of that rising three-note motif, or the falling thirds of the violin theme, or the quicksilver shifts of major to minor that give this music its peculiar character. This is what Clara meant when she commented that “all the movements seem to be of one piece,” for, although Brahms’s connections are intricate and subtle, we sense their presence throughout. For all its apparent beauty, Brahms’s Third Symphony hasn’t always been the most easily grasped of his works. Brahms doesn’t shake us by the shoulders as Beethoven so often did, even though the quality of his material and the logic of its development is up to the Beethovenian standards he set for himself. All four movements end quietly—try to name one other symphony of which that can be said—and some of its most powerful moments are so restrained that the tension is nearly unbearable. Both the second and third movements hold back as much as they reveal. For long stretches, Brahms writes music that never rises above piano; when it does, the effect is always telling. The Andante abounds in beautiful writing for the clarinet, long one of Brahms’s favorite instruments. The
third movement opens with a wonderful arching theme for cello—another of the low, rich sounds Brahms favored—later taken up by the solo horn in a passage so fragile and transparent it overrules all the textbook comments about the excessive weight of Brahms’s writing. There is weight and power in the finale, although it begins furtively in the shadows and evaporates into thin air some ten minutes later. The body of the movement is dramatic, forceful, and brilliantly designed. As the critic Donald Tovey writes in his famous essay on this symphony, “It needs either a close analysis or none at all.” The latter will save the sort of scrutiny that’s not possible in the concert hall, but two things do merit mention. The somber music in the trombones and bassoons very near the beginning is a theme from the middle of the third movement (precisely the sort of thematic reference we don’t associate with Brahms). And the choice of F minor for the key of this movement was determined as early as the fourth bar of the symphony when the cloud of the minor mode crossed over the bold F major opening. Throughout the finale, the clouds return repeatedly (and often unexpectedly), and Brahms makes something of a cliffhanger out of the struggle between major and minor. The ending is a surprise, not because it settles comfortably into F major, but because, in a way that’s virtually unknown to the symphony before the twentieth century, it allows the music to unwind, all its energy spent, content with the memory of the symphony’s opening. CS O.O RG
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Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 COMPOSED
1850s–76
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 4, 1876; Karlsruhe, Germany I N S T R U M E N TAT I O N
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings A P P R OX I M AT E P E R F O R M A N C E T I M E
52 minutes
Beethoven died six years before Brahms was born, but his presence was felt by almost every composer who came after him. Even Brahms, a master of piano music and songs from an early age, put off writing symphonies and string quartets— two Beethoven forms par excellence— offering only the pathetic but honest excuse: “You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you.” Eventually, Brahms turned and faced the giant, but it took him nearly twenty years to do so, and only the magnificence of his own First Symphony gave him the courage to leave the ghost of Beethoven behind him for good. Few great works of music have taken so long to get from sketch to finished
product. Obviously, Brahms had his reasons for sitting on his First Symphony, but eventually, his friends and colleagues began to wonder whether he, like Schubert before him, might leave an unfinished symphony in the attic. (In fact, in 1870, Brahms said he would never complete the piece.) His publisher, Fritz Simrock, finally wrote: “Aren’t you doing anything more? Am I not to have a symphony from you in ’73 either?” But there was no symphony in 1873, just as there had been no symphony any year since 1854 when Brahms first set out to write one. That earliest effort, in the key of D minor (the key of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, incidentally), neatly sidestepped the issue to become Brahms’s first piano concerto, even though the idea of “symphony” is written all over it. Brahms also avoided the challenge with the two serenades that gave him needed and valuable experience writing for the orchestra without directly taking on Beethoven. There was further testing of the waters in the substantial orchestral accompaniment to A German Requiem and other important choral works. And finally, a dress rehearsal of sorts—the grand Variations on a Theme by Haydn from 1873—though this too, for all its mastery of instrumentation and intellectual rigor, was not a symphony.
t h i s pa g e : Johannes Brahms, lithograph portrait, ca. 1865, by Georg Engelbach (1817–1894). Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky | o p p o s i t e pa g e : A pastel drawing of Brahms’s music room in his final residence in Vienna by Carl Müller (1862–1938), 1906
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But Brahms did have a symphony in the works. As early as 1862, he sent a completed first movement to Clara Schumann. “Imagine my surprise!” she wrote to Joseph Joachim, who would one day play the violin concerto Brahms wrote for him in a single summer. Clara’s surprise eventually turned to dismay when Brahms continued to drag things out, sending her the horn call from the finale as a birthday card some six years later, and finally sitting her down to listen as he played the whole symphony at the piano another eight years after that. Although Brahms certainly took his time, he proved to an impatient musical public that there was still music being written that was worth the wait. Unlike his contemporary Anton Bruckner, who made a career out of having second thoughts, Brahms was the best judge of his own work. When a piece didn’t please him, he put it aside or reworked it, or—in the case of his Fifth Symphony—he destroyed it. But he wouldn’t release it.
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hen Brahms sent his completed first movement to Clara Schumann in 1862, it didn’t begin with the fierce and arresting introduction we know but took off like a rocket from the headlong Allegro. Clara confessed to Joachim that the beginning seemed bold and “rather harsh,
but I have become used to it.” Brahms, however, evidently didn’t, because when he played the entire symphony for Clara more than a dozen years later, it began with the powerful, measured drum beat and chromatic unfolding that now lead straight into the Allegro. Even though it was written after the fact—or, perhaps because of that—Brahms’s introduction serves as a preview of what follows: the opening violin line rising by half steps, for example, and the falling thirds in the winds will both be whipped into meaningful shape elsewhere. The Allegro is conceived on the largest scale. The final turn into the recapitulation, in particular, is stretched to incredible lengths—and then, with the destination clearly in sight, the resolution is further delayed by a daring descent into a remote key. For a moment, it appears that Brahms has thrown caution to the wind, but this sudden whim, too, is part of his plan, all calculated with the skill of a master craftsman. CS O.O RG
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From the beginning, Hermann Levi— a perceptive German conductor— thought the two inner movements more suited to a serenade or a suite. But brevity and conciseness aren’t at odds with the symphonic scale—although the grandeur of Brahms’s first movement might lead one to expect something equally imposing to follow. Instead, Brahms’s slow movement, in the surprising key of E major, is intimate and modest, with lovely woodwind solos and a magnificent one for violin at the end. The third movement is no scherzo but an intermezzo, as warm and ingratiating as Brahms’s piano pieces that actually bear the name. With the finale, we come again to Beethoven, partly because any symphony that begins in C minor and then forges triumphantly into C major at the end must face comparison with Beethoven’s Fifth, and partly because Brahms’s big allegro melody suggests nothing more than the great song of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” When the likeness was pointed out, Brahms simply said, “Any ass can see that.” More to the
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point, the English critic Donald Tovey noted that Brahms’s theme is regularly compared with Beethoven’s “only because it is the solitary one among hundreds of the same type that is great enough to suggest the resemblance.” There are other echoes of Beethoven, too. Certainly, the finale’s extensive introduction, clouded with mystery and flaring up with occasional turbulence, takes a cue from Beethoven’s Ninth. But then, so do countless works written in the nineteenth century that don’t profit from the comparison. There’s also much that is pure Brahms, like the unforgettable horn call that parts the clouds and admits the bright sunlight of the C major allegro theme or the brilliant and hair-raising coda, which nearly beats Beethoven at his own game. The ending, in fact, is as exalted and triumphant as any in music, and it’s clear that the triumph is Brahms’s alone.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
PROFILES Staatskapelle Berlin
With a tradition of more than 450 years, Staatskapelle Berlin is one of the oldest orchestras in the world. Originally founded as a court orchestra by PrinceElector Joachim II of Brandenburg in 1570, the ensemble expanded its activities with the founding of the royal court opera in 1742 by Frederick the Great. Since then, the orchestra has been closely tied to Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Many prominent musicians have conducted the orchestra, including Gaspare Spontini, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Felix von Weingartner, Richard Strauss, Erich Kleiber, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Franz Konwitschny, and Otmar Suitner. From late 1991 until January 2023, Daniel Barenboim served as the orchestra’s general music director. Staatskapelle Berlin is one of the world’s leading orchestras, with numerous guest appearances from the great European music centers to Israel, the Far East, and North and South America. Among the outstanding performances P H OTO BY P E T E R A D A M I K
of the orchestra are all of Beethoven’s symphonies and piano concertos in Vienna, Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo; Schumann’s and Brahms’s symphonies; the ten-part cycle of all important stage works by Wagner, and the performance of his Ring cycle in Japan in 2002. In 2007 the symphonies and orchestral songs of Gustav Mahler were performed under Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez at Philharmonie Berlin. This ten-part cycle was also performed at Vienna’s Musikverein and New York’s Carnegie Hall. Recent highlights include a nine-part cycle of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies in Vienna and concert performances of Wagner’s Ring during the BBC Proms in London. The celebrated Bruckner cycle was presented again in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Philharmonie Paris. Staatskapelle Berlin has a constantly growing number of recordings in both operatic and symphonic repertoire. Most recent recordings include all nine symphonies by Bruckner, piano concertos by Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms, as well as large symphonic works by Strauss and Elgar. In addition, the orchestra presented opera productions of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Parsifal, and Tristan and Isolde; Verdi’s Il trovatore and Falstaff, Berg’s Lulu, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride, Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, all under Daniel Barenboim, and Strauss’s Rosenkavalier with Zubin Mehta. In honor of its 450th anniversary, Staatskapelle Berlin released the CD Great Recordings under the batons of esteemed conductors, as well as a CS O.O RG
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book and an exhibition promoting the long and rich history of the orchestra. During the 2022–23 season, Staatskapelle Berlin gave guest concerts in Japan and South Korea, Denmark, Vienna, and Paris. The tour in Asia was directed by Christian Thielemann, who also conducted a new production of Wagner’s Ring in the fall of 2022 at Staatsoper Unter den Linden. At the end of 2023, Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim perform Brahms’s four symphonies in five outstanding musical centers in Canada and the United States. In September 2023, Christian Thielemann was appointed the new general music director, assuming this position in the 2024–25 season. staatskapelle-berlin.de
Jakub Hrůša Conductor A native of the Czech Republic, Jakub Hrůša is chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony; music director designate of the Royal Opera (Covent Garden) in London, where he takes up his post in 2025; and principal guest conductor of the Czech Philharmonic and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Previously, he was principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra London and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.
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Hrůša is a frequent guest with many of the world’s greatest orchestras, enjoying close relationships and performing regularly with the Vienna, Munich, and Berlin philharmonics, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in Berlin, the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor, Hrůša has led productions for the Salzburg Festival (Kát’a Kabanová with the Vienna Philharmonic), Vienna State Opera (The Makropulos Case), Royal Opera House (Carmen and Lohengrin), Opéra National de Paris (Rusalka), and Opernhaus Zürich (The Makropulos Case). He also has been a regular guest at the Glyndebourne Festival and served as music director of Glyndebourne on Tour for three years. In the 2023–24 season, he conducts Janáček’s Jenůfa for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. His relationships with leading vocal and instrumental soloists include collaborations in recent seasons with Behzod Abduraimov, Leif Ove Andsnes, Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Yefim Bronfman, Renaud Capuçon, Gautier Capuçon, Isabelle Faust, Bernarda Fink, Sol Gabetta, Véronique Gens, Christian Gerhaher, Kirill Gerstein, Augustin Hadelich, Hilary Hahn, P H OTO M A R I A N L E N H A R D
P ROF I L ES
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Karita Mattila, Leonidas Kavakos, Lang Lang, AnneSophie Mutter, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Daniil Trifonov, Mitsuko Uchida, Lukáš Vondráček, Yuja Wang, Alisa Weilerstein, and Frank Peter Zimmermann, among others. Jakub Hrůša holds numerous awards and nominations for his discography. In 2022 and 2023, he and the Bamberg Symphony received the ICMA Award for Symphonic Music for recordings of Rott’s Symphony no. 1 and Bruckner’s Symphony no. 4. He garnered the German Record Critics’ Award for Mahler’s Symphony no. 4, and in 2021, his album of violin concertos by Martinů and solo sonata by Bartók with Frank Peter Zimmermann was nominated for BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone awards. His disc of Dvořák’s Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Augustin Hadelich was nominated for a Grammy Award.
His recordings of the piano concertos by Dvořák and Martinů with Ivo Kahánek and the Bamberg Symphony (Supraphon) and Vanessa from Glyndebourne (Opus Arte) won BBC Music Magazine awards in 2020. Jakub Hrůša studied conducting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where his teachers included Jiří Bělohlávek. He is currently president of the International Martinů Circle and the Dvořák Society and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. He was the inaugural recipient of the Sir Charles Mackerras Prize and in 2020 was awarded both the Antonín Dvořák Prize from the Czech Republic’s Academy of Classical Music and the Bavarian State Prize for Music, which he shares with the Bamberg Symphony. In 2023 he was named Opus Klassik Conductor of the Year and won the Bavarian Culture Prize.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association is grateful to Jakub Hrůša for agreeing to lead the Staatskapelle Berlin in this Symphony Center Presents concert. While we are saddened that Maestro Barenboim is unable to return to Chicago for this concert, we are very pleased to be presenting Jakub Hrůša’s debut with the legendary Staatskapelle Berlin.
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Staatskapelle Berlin Jakub Hrůša Conductor FIRST VIOLINS
Wolfram Brandl Concertmaster Jiyoon Lee Concertmaster Yuki Manuela Janke Petra Schwieger Susanne Schergaut Ulrike Eschenburg Susanne Dabels Michael Engel André Witzmann Eva Römisch Andreas Jentzsch Serge Verheylewegen Martha Cohen Darya Varlamova Jueyoung Yang Rachel Buquet SECOND VIOLINS
Krzysztof Specjal Concertmaster Lifan Zhu Concertmaster Mathis Fischer Sanghee Ji André Freudenberger Franziska Dykta Milan Ritsch Barbara Glücksmann Yunna Weber Nora Hapca Asaf Levy Philipp Schell Lena Bozzetti Valentina Paetsch VIOLAS
Yulia Deyneka Principal Volker Sprenger Principal Holger Espig Joost Keizer Katrin Schneider Sophia Reuter Wolfgang Hinzpeter Helene Wilke Stanislava Stoykova Anna-Maria Wünsch Maria Körner Lotus de Vries
CELLOS
Sennu Laine Principal Claudius Popp Principal Nikolaus Popa Alexander Kovalev Isa von Wedemeyer Minji Kang Ute Fiebig Tonio Henkel Amke Jorienke te Wies Joan Bachs DOUBLE BASSES
Otto Tolonen Principal Christoph Anacker Principal Axel Scherka Robert Seltrecht Alf Moser Harald Winkler Martin Ulrich Kaspar Loyal
TRUMPETS
Christian Batzdorf Principal Mathias Müller Principal Felix Wilde Noemi Makkos TROMBONES
Filipe Alves Principal Ralf Zank Henrik Tißen Ruben Rodrigues Tomé TUBA
Sebastian Marhold T I M PA N I
Torsten Schönfeld Principal Stephan Möller Principal PERCUSSION
Martin Barth
FLUTES
Thomas Beyer Principal Claudia Stein Principal Claudia Reuter Christiane Weise OBOES
Gregor Witt Principal Cristina Gómez Principal Florian Hanspach Michael Hertel CLARINETS
Matthias Glander Principal Tibor Reman Principal Hartmut Schuldt Unolf Wäntig BASSOONS
Mathias Baier Principal Ingo Reuter Principal Sabine Müller Robert Dräger HORNS
Yun Zeng Principal Karsten Hoffmann Principal Markus Bruggaier Sebastian Posch Ignacio Garcia Frank Demmler
Matthias Schulz Director Staatsoper Unter den Linden Ronny Unganz Managing Director Staatsoper Unter den Linden Annekatrin Fojuth Orchestra Director Christoph Fiedler Orchestra Manager Sören Schilpp Tour Manager Uwe Timptner Stage Manager Martin Szymanski Stage Crew Mike Knorpp Stage Crew The tour of Staatskapelle Berlin is supported by: American Friends of the Berlin Staatsoper John G. Turner & Jerry G. Fischer Freunde und Förderer der Staatsoper Unter den Linden e.V. Exclusive Tour Management and Representation: Opus 3 Artists 470 Park Avenue South, 9th Floor North, New York, NY 10016 opus3artists.com