Tag: classical music
-
PROGRAM NOTES: NIKKI AND TIMMY CHOOI AND ANGELA CHENG
Claude Debussy Sonata in G minor for violin and piano The sound of Debussy’s music confounded many of his contemporaries. From a tonal point of view, it floated in stasis in a world of pastel sounds that arrived at their destination more by whim than by design. How, they asked, could what he composed actually…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: TETZLAFF-TETZLAFF-VOGT TRIO
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat Major K 502 The piano trio developed out of the ‘accompanied’ keyboard sonata, a makeshift compositional genre that attempted to compensate for the weak ‘tinkly’ tone of the early fortepiano (forerunner of the modern pianoforte) by the addition of a violin to reinforce the singing line…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: JONATHAN ROOZEMAN
Luigi Boccherini Sonata in A major G 4 Luigi Boccherini was perhaps the greatest cellist of the 18th century, and like his compatriot of a previous generation, Domenico Scarlatti, he spent the most active portion of his professional life at the court of Spain. His royal patron, the Spanish Infante Don Luis Antonio, younger brother…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: CHIAROSCURO QUARTET AND KRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT
Franz SchubertString Quartet No. 14 in D minor (“Death & the Maiden”) Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is a sombre work, with all four of its movements set in a minor key. It takes its name from the composer’s lied Der Tod und das Mädchen (1817) that provides the theme for the quartet’s…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: PAUL LEWIS
Franz Joseph Haydn Sonata in E minor Hob. XVI:34 It is unusual to encounter a sonata in a minor key from “Papa” Haydn, a composer best known for his chipper disposition. But his Sonata in E minor likely dates from the late 1770s, which could explain its turbulent mood. The 1770s was the decade of…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: DANISH STRING QUARTET
Ludwig van Beethoven String Quartet in C minor Op. 18 No. 4 In the Napoleonic era, when a Viennese aristocrat was thinking of entertaining friends at home, he might pop down to the local shop to pick up a six-pack—of string quartets, that is. The most refined form of home entertainment in Austria’s capital was…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: FILIPPO GORINI
Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata A flat major Op. 110 Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata is remarkable for the utter simplicity of its musical ideas and the directness with which they are expressed. The most obvious late-period features of this work are an extremely wide keyboard range and a melding of slow movement and finale into a…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV
Richard Wagner Isolde’s Liebestod arr. Franz Liszt The 19th century in Europe was an age in which psychological states went mainstream in the arts, becoming a particularly powerful stimulus for musical expression. A new genre, the nocturne, for example, captured that eerie feeling of being alone with one’s lyrical thoughts at a still point in…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: ZOLTÁN FEJÉRVÁRI
Robert Schumann Waldszenen Op. 82 It is not by chance that Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, the founding work of German musical Romanticism, is set in a forest. Nor is it a coincidence that German Romantic poets from Ludwig Tieck to Joseph von Eichendorff and Heinrich Heine extolled the deep spiritual joys of…
-
PROGRAM NOTES: PAUL LEWIS
Johannes Brahms 7 Fantasies Op. 116 If the word fantasy implies improvisation and free association of thoughts, then the collection of three capricci and four intermezzi that Brahms published under the title Fantasien in 1892 are misnamed, as they are among the most densely expressive and tightly crafted miniatures to come from his pen. Some…