Chicago Symphony Orchestra
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
Encore:
VERDI Overture to Giovanna d'Arco
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.
At a Glance
PHILIP GLASS The Triumph of the Octagon
When Philip Glass came to Chicago for the CSO’s first performance of his 11th Symphony under Riccardo Muti’s direction in February 2022, Glass noticed a photo of a 13th-century castle hanging on the wall. He and Muti began to talk about it, and that brief encounter was the inspiration for this new piece. The castle in question was the Castel del Monte, an octagonal fortress built by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and a site Muti has admired since his childhood. With Glass’s new score, it joins the very slight list of architectural landmarks that have inspired music—a structure built of sustained chords and rolling arpeggios rather than blocks of limestone.
F. MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90, “Italian”
The result of Felix Mendelssohn travels to Italy in 1830 was his A-Major Symphony—a product of the northern mind intoxicated by the Mediterranean spirit. Mendelssohn’s grand tour, which lasted two years, allowed him to see the whole of life in a new perspective. When Mendelssohn wrote home to his sister Fanny, he noted, with obvious surprise, that his new symphony was the “most cheerful piece I have yet composed.”
R. STRAUSS Aus Italien, Op. 16
“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, is, in fact, a love poem to Italy. Strauss called it a “symphonic fantasy,” suggesting its hybrid status between a four-movement symphony with pictorial qualities and the rich programmatic works by Liszt. Strauss’s new score opens the window wide on a different kind of orchestral landscape altogether—a precursor to the landmark tone poems that immediately followed and would make him almost unimaginably famous.