Feels to honor Muti and his warm and encouraging message for new discovery in the contemporaries of this program - classicasobi
Revered conductor Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Felix Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, Richard Strauss’s Aus Italien, and a New York premiere by Philip Glass inspired by Italy and written to honor Muti. Mendelssohn’s sunny Fourth Symphony is a hugely popular work, and it serves as a companion piece to Strauss’s rarely heard “symphonic fantasy,” last performed at Carnegie Hall nearly 50 years ago. In both pieces, the great German composers distill eye-opening travels across Italy into wonderfully evocative music.
Thursday, October 5, 2023 8 PM
Performers
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti, Conductor
Program
PHILIP GLASS The Triumph of the Octagon (NY Premiere)
FELIX MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 4, "Italian"
R. STRAUSS Aus Italien
PHILIP GLASS The Triumph of the Octagon
New premire, written to honor Muti honor Muti. A structure built of sustained chords and rolling arpeggios rather than blocks of limestone.
“While I have written music about people, places, events, and cultures, I cannot recall ever composing a piece about a building. What became clear was that I was not writing a piece about Castel del Monte per se, but rather about one’s imagination when we consider such a place.
I dedicate this work to Maestro Muti, in honor of his many successes as conductor of the CSO and important contributions to the world of music.”
—Philip Glass
F. MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90, “Italian”
“Most cheerful piece I have yet composed.” - MENDELSSOHN, once tried, with utter failure, to interest the 80-year-old Goethe in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. But Goethe recommended to go to Italy to him.
After Mendelssohn’s premature death in 1847, several of his scores, including the “Italian” Symphony, were finally published, widely performed, and welcomed into the repertoire.
Unlike either, and going against the grain of virtually all symphonic finales known to Mendelssohn, this dance begins in the minor mode and stays there to the last chord. Despite its bitter cast, it makes a brilliant and decisive ending.
R. STRAUSS Aus Italien, Op. 16
“The connecting link between the old and the new methods” - Strauss, his first tone poem, himself found the work itself as new and revolutionary,
“I will never be converted to Italian music,” Richard Strauss wrote to his father during his first trip to Italy in the summer of 1886. But Aus Italien, the large-scale symphonic work he began sketching as soon as he arrived
“Immensely proud” of the controversy it stirred: “Some people applauded lustily, others hissed loudly, but finally the applause won the day,” Strauss said after the premiere.
There is no escaping a new influence on Strauss, as well: On his way home from Italy, Strauss stopped over in Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal.
-Edited by classicasobi