Author: VRS
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PROGRAM NOTES: VILDE FRANG
Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Sonata in F major Mendelssohn’s E minor Violin Concerto is such an established pillar of the standard repertory that it comes as a surprise to learn that this composer also wrote three sonatas for the instrument, although these are as obscure as the concerto is popular. The first, in F major,…
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PROGRAM NOTES: BEATRICE RANA
Robert Schumann: Abegg Variations, Op. 1 Schumann’s Abegg Variations first appeared in November of 1831, but Schumann had completed it more than a year earlier, shortly after his twentieth birthday and before he had made the commitment to a life of music (he was still studying law in Heidelberg at the time). It is…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SITKOVETSKY TRIO
Johannes Brahms: Piano Trio no. 3 in C minor, Op. 101 This is the last work Brahms wrote for the piano trio. It is a magnificent work in every respect, from the sharply etched melodies to the concision and masterly manner in which they are handled. It is also one of Brahms’s most compact…
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CAVORTING AT THE CLIBURN
I returned last Monday from a trip to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas with a prize winner and a cold! It has been twenty years since I’ve been to a Cliburn Competition and have decided that I’m not waiting another twenty years. The next competition is in four years and…
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PROGRAM NOTES: TARA ERRAUGHT
Johannes Brahms: Zigeunerlieder (Gypsy Songs), Op. 103 More than half of Brahms’ total output was vocal, including over two hundred art songs and an additional hundred folksong arrangements. Most of them are serious, introspective, resigned or elegiac in mood. Ardent, impulsive effusions are rare, and the musical pictorialism so dear to Schubert is likewise…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SIMON TRPČESKI
Program Notes: Simon Trpčeski Schubert: 16 German Dances, D. 783 (Op. 33) So indelibly is the name Johann Strauss embedded in our consciousness as the purveyor of Viennese dance music that we tend to forget such music existed well before the Waltz King appeared on the scene. Not just minor, forgotten figures like Pamer, Faisatenberger…
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PROGRAM NOTES: DORIC STRING QUARTET
Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, Op. 20, no. 3 A strong new current of artistic expression swept through central Europe during the late 1760s and early 1770s, known as Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). While not every work was stormy or stressful, the moniker served notice that composers were turning…
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PROGRAM NOTES: BENJAMIN GROSVENOR
J. S. Bach: Five transcriptions Benjamin Grosvenor opens his program with a series of piano transcriptions, a genre that was wildly popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then went out of fashion, and is now making something of a comeback. Transcription – the transferal from one medium to another – is as…
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PROGRAM NOTES: NING FENG
Program Notes: Ning Feng Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin sonata no. 1 in D major, Op. 12, no. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his first violin sonatas, a set of three (Op. 12) in 1797-98. Six more sonatas appeared by early 1803, and one more in 1812. Although we refer to these ten works as “violin…
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PROGRAM NOTES: AUGUSTIN HADELICH
Robert Schumann: Violin sonata No. 1 in A minor, Op. 105 Schumann wrote both of his completed sonatas for violin and piano in 1851. His wife Clara played the piano parts at their public premieres with violinists Ferdinand David (No. 1 in 1852) and Joseph Joachim (No. 2 in 1853). Though frequently recorded, these…