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PROGRAM NOTES: BENEDETTI ELSCHENBROICH GRYNYUK TRIO

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Franz Schubert
Adagio from Piano Trio in E at Major Op. 148 D 897

Schubert’s Adagio for Piano Trio D 897 was composed in 1827 but only published decades later, under the publisher’s title Notturno. And indeed, the opening section does conjure up images of nighttime serenity, with its heavenly texture of harp-like arpeggios in the piano supporting a hypnotic melody intoned in close harmony by the two stringed instruments. Formally structured A-B-A-B-A, the work alternates this ‘angelic choir’ A-section with an equally repetitive, but much more assertive and glorious B-section, as triumphalist as anything from a Liszt piano concerto. Without straying much beyond the tonic-dominant harmonic vocabulary of the average ABBA chorus, it manages to stir the passions by means of the wide-ranging carpet of piano tone that it lays down in cascades of broken chords. Sounding like a processional anthem for someone wearing a crown, or at least a long cape, it makes you feel like you ought to be standing while listening to it.

The style of this work, of course, is classic Schubert. In the minds of some it represents an exaggerated Romanticism that abuses the patience of its audience. Detractors obsessed with the prolixity of Schubert’s musical thoughts, and their thin motivic content, will no doubt be quick to point out how the work opens by squatting for a whole six bars on the E at chord – clear evidence of compositional “dithering”. (One wonders what they would say of the pages and pages of E at in Wagner’s Rheingold prelude.) And with a little prompting, they will vent their irritation over how Schubert’s melodies never seem to “go anywhere” but just seem to circle around a single pitch.

Schubert aficionados of long standing will, by contrast, ascribe to these same procedures the virtues of ‘heavenly length’ and ‘delicious dreaminess’. Only arguments from personal taste can be dispositive in deciding whether Schubert provides the soul with dessert-quality Viennese cream puffs of exquisite manufacture, or simply empty musical calories.

What both sides can agree on, however, is that given the repetitious quality of the work’s double-dotted rhythms and its multiple incantations of the same melodic fragments, it is the electrifying changes in harmony that provide the principal drama in this work.

Johannes Brahms
Piano Trio in C Major Op. 87

Brahms’ second piano trio is a deeply serious work, thickly scored for piano, and roiling with the rhythmic ambiguities that are a trademark of the composer’s mature compositional style. Begun in 1880 and completed in 1882, the same period that produced the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B at, it treats the piano very much in the style of that ‘symphonic’ concerto, giving the instrument a massively wide field of play extending to both ends of the keyboard, the hands often separated by as much as four or five octaves.

The violin & cello frequently play in unison or in parallel, pooling their sonic resources to provide a stable sonority in the mid-range of the texture, where the important thematic material is most often presented.

The first movement opens with a broad theme laid before the listener by the violin and cello alone, doubled at the octave. Comprised only of bold melodic leaps, it has the air of a fugue subject, or a fanfare. Themes abound in this movement – there are at least four important ones – but sectional divisions in sonata form are hard to de ne, as the music seems to unfold in a continuous flow. It is a ow that is anything but regular on the rhythmic front, however, as cross-rhythms and conflicts between duple and triple motivic groupings keep the texture restless and irregular, reduced in the ear to great swells of sound and counterbalancing ebbs.

The texture is much simplified in the second movement Andante con moto, a theme and five variations on a folk-like theme, flecked with a biting “Scotch snap” in its melody line and a ponderous Volga-boat-song-like throbbing in its accompaniment. Brahms knew well the gypsy violin style from his youthful days touring with the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi (c.1828-1898) and this style of music is alluded to in the double-stops of the strings and parallel sixth patterns in the piano.

It is one of the oddities of this work that the most melt-in-your-mouth Brahmsian lyrical melody comes in the Trio middle section of the Presto scherzo, not the Andante. Nervous and jittery, if this movement sounds a touch Mendelssohnian, it’s Mendelssohn on too much Red Bull.

Can a movement be both jovial and serious? Brahms proves that it can in his congenial, but sombrely animated sonata-ish rondo finale. This a movement that delights in the continuous variation of its themes, balancing its coy playfulness with an impressive heftiness of texture.

Mark-Anthony Turnage
Duetti d’Amore

British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage is internationally renowned for his orchestral and chamber works, as well as three operas. His compositional style is modernist, rife with sharp percussive accents, but also features outbursts of sustained lyrical emotion. Both popular music and jazz, especially Miles Davis, are important influences on his style.

It is no secret why the music of Turnage resonates so strongly with younger listeners. Breathlessly contemporary, it often alludes to engaging aspects of modern life and popular culture. His opera Anna Nicole catalogues the life of model and television personality Anna Nicole Smith while his string quartet, Twisted Blues with Twisted Ballad, references Led Zeppelin.

Duetti d’Amore (Love Duets) is a collection of five miniatures on the subject of modern love, commissioned by Nicola Benedetti and Leonard Elschenbroich and premiered by them in 2015. The work is shrink-wrapped around the instrumental personalities of the two performers, presenting them in musical narrative as the male and female partners of a romantic couple who quarrel, embrace, and make up in an ongoing pattern of stormy interaction.

It features no advanced instrumental techniques and unfolds in an alternation of aggressive and lyrical duets, with Duetto 2 and Duetto 4 being the more sustained and lyrical portraits of this love bond, Duetti 1, 3 and 5 the more fiery aspects of the relationship. Duetto 5, the “Blues” finale, brings their discord, and mutual attraction, strongly into focus.

Maurice Ravel
Piano Trio in A minor

Ravel’s concern for classical form and balanced structure may be summed up in his only-half-joking comment concerning the progress he was making on his Piano Trio in A minor: “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” In this trio Ravel offers us a classically proportioned four-movement work in the traditional format: two sonata-form movements bookending a scherzo and slow movement.

Completed just after the Great War had broken out in August 1914, this work dreams far above the tumult of the conflict. This is understandable as Ravel was far from the front at the time. He was near the Basque town in southern France where he was born, and the imprint of Basque musical culture is strong in this work, most evidently in the rhythmic patterning of the first movement, with its unusual time signature of 8/8. The 8 beats of the bar are divided up 3+2+3 throughout, a pattern common in Basque dance music. The movement has two distinct themes, clearly distinguished in tone, and the texture is shiningly transparent due to the skillful way in which Ravel positions the instruments in sonic space so as not to cover each other.

Ravel’s exalting scherzo second movement has a number of unusual features. Its title, Pantoum, refers to a Malaysian interlocking verse form, popular with many French poets, that Ravel incorporates into the structure of his already- formally-structured A-B-A scherzo & trio. A staccato opening theme alternates with more lyrical phrases, often grouped for the ear with scant regard for the 3/4 time signature. But then something even more irregular happens in the trio: the strings continue on fidgeting in 3/4 while the piano calmly intones a lyrical sequence of cool chords in 4/2, after which the sides switch places, which is to say metres. This movement is the champagne sorbet of the trio as a whole.

The slow movement is a Passacaille, a series of variations based on a wandering eight-bar theme announced deep, deep in the bass that migrates up through the cello to the violin, and then swells to a great climax before receding back to the spare texture with which it began.

Ravel goes full-on orchestral in his finale, a movement which features some tricky challenges for the instrumentalists, starting with the violin’s 4-string arpeggio pattern – all in harmonics – that opens the movement. Other touches of orchestral sound colour are the plush tremolos in the strings that often surround the piano like a fur collar, or the electrifying high trills in the same instruments. Alternating between 5/4 and 7/4 time signatures, this movement drifts in a seemingly timeless world of spontaneous, irregular pulsations that build to an ecstatic finish that sees the last pages blaring out toujours ff, as it says in the score: continuously very loud.

Donald G. Gíslason 2017

PROGRAM NOTES: YEKWON SUNWOO

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Franz Schubert
Sonata in C minor D 958

Schubert’s unabashed admiration for Beethoven is vividly on display in the opening bars of his Sonata in C minor D 958, composed in September 1828, shortly before his death. Schubert had served as a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral the year before, and his own death from tertiary syphilis was to be only months away, which may perhaps account for the unusually serious tone of this work.

The key chosen for the sonata, C minor, is synonymous with Beethoven’s most turbulent musical thoughts, as expressed in the Pathétique Sonata, the Fifth Symphony, the last piano sonata Op. 111– as well as the famous 32 Variations in C minor, after which Schubert’s de ant opening statement is rhythmically and harmonically patterned.

Schubert has not lost himself entirely, however, in Beethoven’s musical personality, as his choice of second theme shows. This theme is pure Schubert, a lovingly affectionate little hymn with chiming, bell-like pedal tones that Schubert somehow then manages to transform into a dance. Drama returns, however, in the development section, that chews away at the first theme’s motives before settling into a long rumination on a neighbour-note figure alternating between bass and treble. The re-transition to the sonata’s opening statement to begin the recapitulation is masterfully handled by means of menacing hints in the bass line of the aggressive punchy chords that began the movement.

Schubert’s second movement is something of an eyebrow-raiser: it is a real adagio, a comparative rarity in the works of a composer whose lyrical instincts tended to emerge at a more moderato pace. In its concentrated lyrical tone, piecemeal phrasing, and style of ornamentation, it owes much to the Adagio molto second movement of Beethoven’s sonata Op. 10 No. 1 in C minor. Not to mention the accompanimental patterns that it borrows from the slow movement of another sonata in C minor, the Pathétique.

There is an anxious, worrying quality about the Minuetto & trio that it is hard to put your finger on. Minuets in a minor key are a bit odd to start with, although Mozart produced a sublime example in his Symphony No. 40 in G minor K 550. The sense of unease in Schubert’s minuet may simply be a matter of how this movement seems alienated from the spirit of the dance. Its irregular phrase lengths, the sudden disturbing changes in dynamics and unexpected silences are more ghostly than toe-tapping.

And ghostly is a good description of the last movement Allegro, in which Schubert unleashes his inner playful demon with wicked glee. This moto perpetuo movement, with its dancelike tarantella rhythm (likely patterned after the finale of Beethoven’s Sonata in E at Op. 31 No. 3), is both thrilling and strangely ominous, reminiscent of the night ride in Schubert’s famous Erlkönig. The keyboard writing is brilliantly effective, however, especially in the galloping second theme, with its cross-handed texture of melodic fragments jockeying between high and low register, leaping across a steady horse-hoof pulse in the middle of the keyboard.

Percy Grainger
Ramble on the Last Love-Duet from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier

The Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger is best known for his arrangement of the English folksong, In an English Country Garden. He also wrote piano paraphrases, many of which he labelled “rambles,” presumably to indicate the meandering pleasure he took in wandering through the musical meadows of other composers’ works. His most elaborately wrought of these is based on the love duet between Sophie and Octavian (Ist ein Traum, kann nicht wirklich sein) in the final scene of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911).

Grainger was an admirer of Richard Strauss, the great virtue of whose music lay in its sumptuous “vulgarity” (Grainger’s word), vastly preferable, in his view, to the demeanour of modesty and emotional restraint of, for example, Ravel. Armed with these premises, the modern listener should be prepared, when listening to Grainger’s Rosenkavalier Ramble, for an encounter with the aesthetic tastes of a bygone era, an era of ear-tickling “frilly” pianism offered up in a tenor of open-hearted emotionalism encapsulated in the term “schmaltz”.

Grainger composed this paraphrase in what he calls his “harped” style, one in which waves of harmonic colour are heard to ripple across the entire sound register of the instrument in poetic arpeggio formations, and even the notes of chords written on the same stem are not always served up in solid blocks but rather “sprinkled” out in digital sequence. It is a style that luxuriates in the amount of keyboard real estate it can occupy in a single phrase, with each tuneful scrap of melody intoned in the mid-range paired with a sonic echo somewhere in the outer regions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the distance between the concert hall and the piano lounge narrows considerably during the performance of this work.

Audience members with a bird-watcher’s interest in rare sightings will want to train their opera glasses on the pianist’s shoelaces before the piece begins to catch a glimpse of the middle “sostenuto” pedal being deployed as selected bass notes are silently depressed above on the keyboard.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sonata No. 2 in B at minor Op. 36

Rachmaninoff ’s second piano sonata is in three movements bound together by the cyclical recurrence of common musical motives. It sounds like one continuous work in three parts, however, as the first movement closes softly and is followed by a bridge section at the opening of the second movement that recurs at the end to connect it to the finale. This sonata is a massive work in which Rachmaninoff projects his trademark sense of pianistic power and musical muscle as convincingly as he does in his piano concertos, with which the sonata shares some large-scale formal design features: a fast middle section in the ‘slow’ movement and a glorious apotheosis of lyrical melody at the end of the last movement – prominent features of his 2nd and 3rd piano concertos.

The work opens with one of the great dramatic gestures in the piano repertoire, an arpeggio plunging to the bottom of the keyboard followed by a cannon-echo above that outlines the first theme: a falling 3rd, and chromatically descending melody, developed over a series of cadenza-like passages before a calmer, more hymn-like second theme appears in the major mode, also based on the chromatic melody. The development section delves deep into the chromatic contours of both themes to climax in a gigantic wall of sound descending in massive fist-chords of piano sonority, leading directly to the triumphant return of the opening material. Despite grandiose flirtations with the major mode in this recapitulation, the movement dissolves in the end into a simmering, almost malevolent cat-purr of minor-mode figuration in the high register, like a fever that has ebbed, but not quite run its course.

The second movement opens with a series of questioning phrases, as if bewildered and almost dejected. Solace does come, though, in a luminous texture of gentle pulses crowned by bright and ringing bell-strokes on a high pedal note in the treble. The lyrical climax of the movement comes shortly thereafter in a heart-breaking series of harmonic sequences that tug at the emotions as only Rachmaninoff can. The mood then turns darkly ruminative, as fragments of the first movement are worried and fretted over until the opening material is recalled and the questioning phrases return.

The finale interrupts this mood of contemplation with a cascade of sound and a series of stabbing gestures that issues into the first theme, a wild ride surging onward in a solid wall of sound, reinforced by the frequent tolling of the lowest B at on the keyboard, plumbed over and over again. Rachmaninoff ’s lyrical instincts then take over to offer us a warmly generous and expansive second theme that later becomes the exalted subject of the movement’s apotheosis. The movement ends, like the concertos, with a scramble to the finish in reworks reminiscent of the ending of the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto.

Maurice Ravel
La Valse

Ravel had been planning to write a celebration of the Viennese waltz since 1906, when he began to sketch out a piece he called simply Wien (Vienna),a tribute to the “waltz king,” Johann Strauss II. But it was only under a commission from Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the famous Ballets Russes, that he was prompted to finish it in 1920. Diaghilev hated the work after hearing it played in Ravel’s two-piano version, but the composer published it in an orchestral version anyway and it premiered in 1926. Meanwhile, the original solo piano version produced when the work was composed endured as a daunting enigma for intrepid pianists to master and perform.

The problems to be confronted are many. With three authentic versions issuing from the pen of the composer, what is a pianist to do? The solo piano score is an ultra-compressed version of both the two-piano and orchestral versions. A signi cant portion of it is written with a third staff above the regular piano part to indicate prominent lines in the other versions, so every performance is by definition a kind of transcription: the pianist must decide just how much to include. Leave out the slyly creeping chromatic ligree in the inner lines and much of the piece’s Viennese charm is lost. Omit the extravagant glissandi at climactic high points and the piece loses a major source of its propulsive exuberance.

Yet another problem is that the score is unusually dark for Ravel. It begins rumbling deep down in the bass in preparation for bits of waltz rhythm to emerge haphazardly above in the mid-range. After this introduction, the work is structured as a series of waltzes, alternating in mood between an uninhibited, sometimes explosive joie de vivre and more demure evocations of coyness and lilting nostalgia.

Ravel describes what he called his poème chorégraphique as follows: “Swirling clouds a ord glimpses, through rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds scatter little by little; one can distinguish an immense hall with a whirling crowd. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855.”

Donald G. Gíslason 2017

PROGRAM NOTES: THE VERONA QUARTET

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Franz Joseph Haydn
Quartet in B at major Op. 50 No. 1

The art music of Western Europe underwent a period of transition in the mid- 18th century as the thickly embroiled scores of the Baroque, with their long spun-out melodic lines and constant harmonic churn, gradually yielded to the clearer textures, symmetrical phrases and slower harmonic rhythms of
the emerging Classical era. Haydn was one of the chief architects of the new musical style and a new musical genre, the string quartet, played a leading role in its propagation.

As an ensemble of smoothly blended stringed instruments, the quartet naturally lent itself to an equality of part-writing that Haydn exploited to create engaging musical ‘conversations’, with phrases that asked questions answered by phrases that replied to them, and featuring instruments that led the discussion while others ‘listened’ in sympathetic accompaniment.

In Viennese circles the string quartet was an all-male ensemble of wealthy amateurs and professional musicians who, like the madrigal singers of the Renaissance, made music in private for their own enjoyment. The exclusive nature of the gathering, along with its masculine sensibility, meant that in- jokes and prankish humour, of a sort that Haydn was particularly adept at concocting, were a much-appreciated element of the style. The exchange of knowing smiles and impish smirks between players was evidently a major feature of the evening’s entertainment.

Few works embody this ideal of connoisseurship like the set of six quartets Op. 50 that Haydn wrote in 1787, dedicated to King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia and known as the Prussian quartets. They could just as easily be called the Seinfeld quartets for their quality of improvising musical theatre out of nothing – out of mere scraps of melody and memorable fragments of rhythm.

Witness the opening Allegro movement of the first in the set, the Quartet in B at, in which the entire discursive content is laid out sequentially in the first 8 bars: the pulsing of a single low pitch by the solo cello, a cute little up-and- down gure that cadences after it’s just begun, and the same up-and-down gure cast in triplets. From these pulsing, cadencing & triplet motives alone Haydn creates an entire sonata-form movement: a monothematic movement (as was oft his wont), since his second subject, in triplets, derives directly from the triplets of his first. So seamlessly interwoven, in fact, are the motivic and formal Lego pieces of this movement that modern scholars are still at brickbats about just where the recapitulation begins.

In the Adagio non lento theme and variations, the accent is on decoration. The theme is an assemblage of small motivic gestures with many coy leaps, set in a siciliano rhythm. The following three variations and coda lace the theme with ever-more-frilly garlands of accompanimental ligree, with the lyrical core of the movement residing in the operatically-inspired central variation in the minor mode.

The Poco Allegretto minuet & trio displays a subtle quirkiness in its metrical dissonances, with a triplet-vs-duplet tussle evident in the very first statement of the theme. Accented off-beat entries and sliding chromatic lines add to the dizziness, but the sparkling highlight of the movement comes in the clever hiccuping of the 1st and 2nd violin lines in the trio.

The Vivace last movement is a bustling, high-energy romp in the spirit of an opera buffa finale, with lively contrapuntal exchanges between the instruments and hairpin changes in direction alternating with addle-brained moments of comic indecision and goofy episodes of daydreaming. Built on a simple downward arpeggio pattern, it is another monothematic sonata-form movement, but one that seems to want to be a rondo, but one that seems to want to be a rondo, with its veer pattern of recurring refrains.. Don’t be fooled by the apparently final-sounding cadence in the recapitulation. It’s a ruse! Haydn puts in a gran pausa, a full two-bar rest, to make you think the movement is over … then merrily begins again to lead the work to its real conclusion.

Dmitri Shostakovich
Quartet No. 7 in F# minor Op. 108

The worlds of Shostakovich and Haydn were poles apart, as different as 18th- century Vienna and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Soviet ideology celebrated national folk music and looked down on elitism in art, so merely writing a string quartet, with its origins in the salons of the Viennese aristocracy, risked labelling its composer as a cultural dissident. And yet Shostakovich wrote 15 string quartets in his career and there is no shortage of critical commentary that interprets them as products of their political environment.

Shostakovich’s chromatically wandering melodies seem to be searching in numb bewilderment for their place in the natural tonal world, and never really nding it. The lack of harmonic drive, the sparse textures, and generally low dynamic range seem to symbolize a kind of social alienation that is easy to map onto the daily life of citizens living under a repressive regime.

Another view, however, might see the composition of these string quartets as escaping the pressures of Soviet society rather than typifying them, as retreating to an abstract world of formal compositional practice in a direct line of descent from Haydn. Because for all their moonscape strangeness, the string quartets of Shostakovich are written “the old-fashioned way”: with identifiable musical motives developed within an imitative contrapuntal texture that lls out a large-scale formal plan – the very essence of Haydn’s string quartet language.

Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7 in F# minor, written in 1960, makes a strong case for this view, so tightly is its construction based on the development of its clearly marked musical motives. The work is structured in three movements played without a break, in a large-scale cyclical design, its last movement almost entirely based on transformed materials from the first two movements.

It opens with the solo 1st violin playing a seemingly carefree series of 3-note gures, chromatically tripping down the F# minor scale to end in a 3-note ‘door-knocking’ rhythm on one note – a rhythm that permeates most of the movement, even the buoyant second theme announced by the cello. The opening scalar descent is soon developed in pizzicato triplets, ever dogged by the door-knocking rhythm, which o ciates even in the slow coda at the end of the movement.

The Lento second movement demonstrates how Shostakovich keeps his textures starkly simple and easy to grasp in the ear. In this movement he places a rhythmic ostinato in the mid-range while motivic and thematic play alternates on both sides of it. He begins with a roaming 16th-note pattern of noodling in the 2nd violin, over which the 1st violin intones a searingly intense, but chilling cantilena, soon passed to the cello in its high register. The mid- range murmuring then changes to a di erent kind of ostinato, in a constant dotted rhythm, as ghostly melodic phrases alternate above and below.

The stage is now set for the finale, which swallows the motives of the previous two movements whole and spits them out in radically new guises. This last movement is in two sections: a violently aggressive Allegro followed by a more re ective Allegretto. It opens with the series of tripping 3-note gures that began the quartet, inverted now into a de antly set of ascending gestures climbing up the scale. Soon the innocuous noodlings and dotted gures that had murmured in the background of the second movement burst into the foreground at volume as the two-part subject of a teeth-gritting fugue, at the climax of which the 2nd movement’s searing melody emerges, followed by the original descending gures from the 1st movement and their culminating ‘door-knocking’ triplets.

Taking the movement to its conclusion is an Allegretto that pores soothing oil on these troubled waters, still using materials from the previous movements, but with its slower pace and almost waltz-like musical character leading the movement to an enigmatically quiet coda much like that of the first movement, now experienced as a final bookend to the work as a whole.

Maurice Ravel
Quartet in F major

Comparisons between Debussy and Ravel are inevitable when thinking of French impressionism and the string quartets of these two composers – Debussy’s of 1893 and Ravel’s of 1903 – provide an unusually fertile ground for such comparisons. Both works exhibit a feeling for the exotic in their use of modal melodies and cozy harmonies chosen for their colour rather than their drive to arrive at a cadence. Both relish unusual textures and timbres (e.g., the pizzicato-dominated scherzos in both) and the use of a cyclic design that sees the same themes recur between movements.

But whereas Debussy’s world is more dreamlike and motivated by free association, Ravel’s more clearly focussed and formally controlled. The willingness to oat in an ever-changing moment of timeless rêverie
is uppermost in Debussy, the crystalline sense of order and classical craftsmanship is stronger in Ravel.

Ravel reveals himself to be the compositional master of the iron (formal) hand in the velvet (timbral) glove especially well in his Quartet in F major, with its layout in the four traditional movements of classical practice: a sonata-form opening movement, 2nd movement scherzo and contrasting trio, a lyrical 3rd movement, and rondo-ish finale.

Two contrasting themes motivate the formal procedures of the gently-paced first movement: a thoughtful, musing first theme introduced at the opening by the 1st and 2nd violins, and a second more introspective second theme played by the 1st violin and viola together two octaves apart. The development section sets these themes against a plush background of quivering tremolos that contribute mightily to its climax and the recapitulation is a paragon of balanced repetition, being almost a carbon-copy of the exposition. Notable in the movement’s soothing coda are the cello’s 10 bars of consecutive parallel perfect fifths (!), a harmonic practice banned in traditional harmony.

The scherzo is a kaleidoscope of colourful musical e ects: pizzicato timbres, shrieking high trills, and alternating patterns of 3/4 and 6/8 meters, suggestive of both Spanish folk-dance rhythms and the complex overlays of a Javanese gamelan ensemble. The slower, almost morose trio middle section repurposes previous melodic material to create a kind of a casserole of broken musical pasta pieces before hinting at, then diving into, a repeat of the opening section.

The third movement is a deeply lyrical rhapsody in many sections, with sinuous, sensuous melodies (many recalling previous movements) set against a number of evocative timbral backdrops. The stillness of night is almost palpable in this movement, although an underlying passion lurks deep beneath the trembling sonic foliage, a passion that nds expression in the movement’s throbbing climax.

The finale is a kind of rondo, alternating urgently propelled circling motives in quintuple meter (5/8 and 5/4) with calmer, more lyrical sections in 3/4 that nostalgically remember themes from earlier movements. Tremolo in this finale is not used as a mere background accompaniment, but rather as the main source of propulsive energy driving the movement to its exultant conclusion.

Donald G. Gíslason 2017

Program Notes: Augustin Hadelich

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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 sonatas are only occasionally heard in the concert hall. The violin part tends to remain in the lower range where it merges, rather than contrasts, with the piano’s sonority; the upper range of the violin is seldom exploited; thematic ideas within the sonata-form movements are not always clearly differentiated; and not every movement is free from mechanical repetitiveness. But counterbalancing these qualities are Schumann’s often passionate themes, poetic ideas, rich textures and rhythmic urgency that contribute many inspired moments to the music.

The A minor sonata exemplifies many of these assets well in its opening bars. Instructed to play “with passionate expression”, the violinist plunges headlong into a sweeping theme full of romantic yearning and grand gestures. The second movement opens with a capricious but sunny principal theme that alternates with two short episodes, the first soulful, the second bustling. The turbulent, agitated mood returns in the finale. Violin and piano chase each other through a skittish first theme, whose rhythmic pattern pervades the entire movement. The second theme brings with it a measure of lyrical respite, but we are never far from the almost overbearing presence of the staccato rhythmic pattern.

Toru Takemitsu: From Far Beyond Chrysanthemums and November Fog
When Toru Takemitsu died seventeen years ago, the world lost one of its greatest composers of the late twentieth century. The enormous list of prestigious commissions, honours, awards and prizes he received (including the $50,000 Glenn Gould Prize in Ottawa in 1996) attest to his stature as one of the preeminent musical figures of our time. Takemitsu’s great achievement was to synthesize with a high degree of success aspects of both Western and Oriental esthetics and techniques. A preoccupation with timbres, textures, colours and evanescent sonorities is the hallmark of Takemitsu’s style, while freely evolving musical material, contemplative moods and a sensation of quasi-spatial experience inform most of his music. In addition, there is a sense of profound reserve and self-control in this music, which is often dreamy, sensuous, delicate and imbued with a huge palette of delicate pastels. The title From Far Beyond Chrysanthemums and November Fog (1983) comes from a stanza of a poem entitled “In the Shadow” by the Japanese poet Makoto Ooka. Takemitsu exploits the idea of “shadow” in the music by using what he calls six “dominant” pitches and six “shadow” pitches.

Maurice Ravel: Tzigane
It was through the Hungarian violinist Jelly D’Aranyi that Ravel became acquainted with gypsy music; he found it so fascinating that he determined to write a piece in this style for her. Two years later, he produced the Tzigane (French for gypsy, and related to the German Zigeuner), modeled after the freely structured Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano by Liszt. D’Aranyi and Ravel gave the first performance in London on April 26, 1924. The violin part was phenomenally difficult, and d’Aranyi had only a few days to learn it, but such was her mastery that Ravel remarked: “If I had known, I would have made the music still more difficult.” That July he transcribed the piano part for full orchestra.
The work opens with a long, unaccompanied presentation of the melodic material by the solo violin. In the course of a freely rhapsodic succession of ideas employing the so-called gypsy scale, the instrument indulges in all manner of virtuosic effects, including harmonics, double, triple and even quadruple stops.

Leoš Janáček:Violin sonata
Janáček’s music is steeped in the folk music idioms and speech patterns of his Moravian homeland, located in the north central region of what was formerly Czechoslovakia. “The whole life of man is in folk music,” he proclaimed. Hence, it comes as no surprise to find that this composer’s melodic material, both vocal and instrumental, follows closely the inflections, cadences and rhythms of the Czech language, and that he developed a uniquely expressive style.

Janáček left just one violin sonata, which he wrote in his sixties. (His two student works in the genre are lost.) “I wrote it at the beginning of the War when we were expecting the Russians in Moravia,” he declared. This was meant in a positive sense, for Janáček was counting on the Russians to liberate his country from the yoke of the Hapsburgs. Some listeners hear the sound of gunfire evoked in the final movement. Evocations of Russia can also be detected in the first and third movements, where the tone and melodic shapes resemble certain passages in Janáček’s opera Katya Kabanova, whose story comes from a Russian drama (The Storm by Ostrovsky). The sonata went through several transformations before arriving at its final form in 1922. The premiere was given that year in Brno by František Kudlaček and Jaroslav Kvapil.

André Previn: Tango, Song and Dance
André Previn unquestionably ranks among the most talented, versatile and best known musicians of our time. Now approaching his 82nd birthday, he sits comfortably at the pinnacle of numerous professions: as orchestrator (a service he was already providing MGM Studios back in high school), arranger, jazz pianist (as such he began recording in the days of 78s), classical pianist, conductor, television host, composer of film scores, author (of his memoir No Minor Chords) and composer of classical music.

Previn composed Tango, Song and Dance in 1997 as a set of lighthearted virtuoso pieces for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. She and the composer gave the first performance on August 26, 2001 in Lucerne. Previn writes that in the first movement “the clustered harmonies are not terribly far removed from the sound the traditional accordion makes.” In the Song, “the violin predominates throughout, and the accompaniment is simple and direct.” Of the Dance, Previn notes that “I doubt whether dancers would be happy keeping time to this, but of course for two instrumentalists it becomes a good deal easier.”

 

Program notes by Robert Markow, 2013.

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