Tag: concert
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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…
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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…
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PROGRAM NOTES: ANDREW TYSON
Alban Berg Sonata Op. 1 The tonal system in use throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, from Bach to Tchaikovsky, was predicated on the understanding that pieces would be in a home key – from which they would depart, and to which they would return – and that harmony would result from the interaction of chords…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…