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Midori |
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Home > Music: Festival and Indoors > 2010 Festival > Midori
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JULY 11 MIDORI IN RECITAL
Sunday, 4:30pm ~ Venetian Theater
In a realm of her own, Midori needs no introduction. Her development from the technical virtuosity and poise of her child prodigy years to a deeply expressive and powerful artist has set Midori apart as a master musician. She joins forces with pianist Ozgur Aydin--winner of the ARD International Music Competition 1997 in Munich--in a profoundly poetic program that plumbs the depths of musical beauty and expression.
Introduce your family to Caramoor and enjoy the sounds of the concert from the picnic lawns.
Concert Al Fresco tickets: $10.00 order online
Visit Midori's website at www.GoToMidori.com and her Facebook at www.facebook.com/GoToMidori.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Violin Sonata No. 4 in A minor, Op. 23
Very little is known about the history of the Opus 23 violin sonata beyond the fact that Beethoven completed it in 1801 and published it in October of the same year with a dedication to Count Moritz von Fries. It was originally announced as one of two violin sonatas to be published together, but for some reason the other work appeared finally with a different number as Opus 24. The two works were composed at the same time, though, since sketches for both of them are found in the same sketchbook.
The first movement is quite thoroughly in the minor mode almost throughout and veers in mood between the plaintive and the fierce. Violin and piano interact with each other throughout in intricate echoes and intertwinings. The 6/8 rhythm has little that is jaunty about it, and the development is very rich. The middle movement is much more cheerful, even “jesting,” as the composer’s tempo qualification “scherzoso” would have it. The piano introduces a simple A Major theme with rests which will eventually be filled in by the violin. A three-part fugato serves as the transition to the dominant to prepare the introduction of new material. By this time it is evident that we are faced with a slow-movement sonata form, which has a rather elaborate (for this tempo) development based on interplay between the opening idea and the fugato material. The dialogue between violin and piano finally settles back on the tonic for the recapitulation in which the opening theme is elaborated with wit and charm. The finale is a rondo, once more in A minor, that recaptures, to some extent, the mood of the first movement.
Ernest Bloch
1880-1959
Violin Sonata No. 2 (Poème mystique)
The Swiss-born American composer Ernest Bloch composed two violin sonatas, of which the first (written in 1920) is pretty much a repertory piece, widely known both to players and audiences and frequently recorded. The second sonata, though, to which Bloch gave the name Poème mystique, is encountered far less frequently and has been recorded only about a third as often as the earlier work. Yet at the time of the work’s composition, the First Sonata was regarded as a tortured and difficult exercise in modern music and Bloch himself was considered too “advanced” (the term was not flattery in the circles that used it). He was struck, while listening to a performance of the earlier sonata in 1924, at how much difficulty the audience had in relating to the composition. He determined to write something that expressed calmer and more serene sentiments. The title probably arose from the fact that Bloch somehow experienced the music of the second sonata, or at any rate found the key to its approach, in a dream that came at the end of a period of illness.
The single-movement work grows out of traditional chant and chantlike melodies. Bloch had long drawn upon the Jewish tradition for musical material in many of his best-known works. Here he combined the inflections of Hebraic cantillation with melodies from the Gregorian chant—the “Credo” melody and part of the Gloria from the plainsong Mass “Kyrie fons bonitatis.” These materials seem to fit naturally together, since many of the oldest chants of the Christian church are apparently descendents of musical formulas sung in the Temple at Jerusalem and carried widely abroad in the Diaspora. In any case, Bloch turns them all to good purpose in this sometimes shimmering, essentially tranquil music.
Karol Szymanowski
1882-1937
Mythes, Op. 30
Just as Brahms consulted with Joachim in working out the details of the solo part in his violin concerto, Karol Szymanowski consulted with the violinist Pawel Kochanski—and not only on one violin concerto, but two, and numerous other works for violin as well. Between them they developed new ways of treating the violin that greatly influenced some later composers, such as Bartók.
Sometimes compared to Bartók as a nationalist who created a musical language out of the melos of his people, Szymanowski may not have the international acclaim and influence of the Hungarian master, but he shares with him a development from a late Romantic style to a highly individual idiom that relinquished traditional tonality for polar centers with a melodic style that employs abstracted elements of his native folk song.
He grew up in a highly musical family and began composing sophisticated piano works quite early on. Then he turned to the larger forms. Many of these early pieces show the influence of Reger and Strauss. But while working on his first opera, Hagith, for which he steeped himself in the culture and music of the Arab lands and the mythology of the classical world, he also took over many textural and harmonic ideas from Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin, absorbing their influence into a new synthesis of his own, a language of sensuous and flexible chromaticism.
Szymanowski composed the three Myths at a friend’s estate in the spring months of 1915. On his arrival there he found the Kochanskis staying there as well, and he embarked with Pawel on a series of works featuring the violin—the three Myths, followed soon after by the Violin Concerto No. 1. These works were central to his establishment of a new style, particularly his characteristic use of the violin. Years later Szymanoski acknowledged to Zofia Kochanska, the wife of the violinist with whom he worked out this new violin style and the dedicatee of Myths, that her husband had played a major role in creating the high tessitura of the pieces, the extensive use of harmonics, notated special effects, and extensive double-stops.
Szymanowski had a passion for classical antiquity. On a visit to Syracuse, in Sicily, he had seen the small island of Ortygia in the harbor. There is a fresh-water spring on the island which, legend has it, is linked below the earth with a river, the Alphios, in Arcadia. The spring on the island and the river take their names from a myth that is presented in the opening movement, The Fountain of Arethusa.
The nymph Arethusa wished to remain a chaste attendant of Artemis. One day she bathed in a clear stream, only to learn that the stream itself was the river god Alpheus, who fell in love with her. In order to avoid his pursuit, she prayed to Artemis to protect her. At first Artemis hid her in a cloud, but Alpheus continued his pursuit. Then she perspired profusely and melted into a stream; Artemis broke the ground under her so she could flow below the earth, out of sight. She fled under the sea-bed and ended far away on the island just off the Sicilian coast.
Szymanowski’s music has the fluid “watery” quality that we find sometimes in the music of Debussy and Ravel, flexibly shifting the meter between 3/8 and 4/8 with a shimmering subsurface in the piano supporting a high-lying violin part that sings the efforts of Arethusa turned into a stream to evade the unwanted attentions of Alpheus. This work, and the other two that comprise Myths as a whole, marked the first stage in the expansion of Szymanowski’s popularity in Europe as a whole and well beyond his local region.
Johannes Brahms
1833-1897
Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108
Although Brahms did not spend his winters conducting an orchestra (as did Mahler, for example), he nonetheless concentrated his composition into the summer months, which he spent as much as possible in beautiful locations in Austria, and concentrated on purely creative work. The winters he could then spend on polishing the results of the summer’s active leisure, editing and proofreading his music.
He worked on four chamber compositions—the Opus 99 cello sonata, the Opus 100 violin sonata in A Major, the Opus 101 piano trio, and the present Opus 108—during the summer of 1886, the first of three consecutive summers that he spent at Hofstetten on Lake Thun. The first three works were quickly finished and had their first performances by year’s end. Opus 108 continued to occupy him on and off until 1888, when the first performance took place in Budapest.
He may have conceived his final violin sonata as a kind of opposite to the A Major violin sonata (Opus 100) that he had so recently composed. The earlier sonata is in the major mode, lyrical in its style and impact, in three movements, and employs references to some of Brahms’s own songs as part of its thematic material. Opus 108 is darkly minor in mode, taut and dramatic in its emotional progression, contains four movements, and builds its material on new and abstract motivic figures. This sonata, Brahms’s last work for piano and violin, is dedicated to the conductor Hans von Bülow. It has the feel of a large work, and not only because it has one movement more than the two earlier sonatas (even so the treatment is so economical that it has a shorter performance time than the Opus 100 sonata). Its unusual dramatic power may be motivated by the tonality of D minor, in which Brahms had also composed one of his earliest and most dramatic large-scale works, the First Piano Concerto.
Although the sonata begins sotto voce, the current of tension in the piano’s syncopations is evident under the violin’s sweetly melancholic song, and the restrained energy of that tension is not long in breaking out. The development has a quite extraordinary effect: the note A is repeated in the piano, like the soft but insistent tolling of a bell, on every single quarter note of its forty-six measures. Because both the exposition and development are kept within such tight bounds, Brahms is able to expand in the recapitulation, offering new treatments of material heard before in its original guise. The rocking figure from the development, now heard on the tonic note D, becomes the basis for the coda of the movement.
The slow movement is one of those lavish Brahms melodies that starts out in all simplicity and then, just as it is in danger of becoming foursquare and predictable, opens out into unexpected paths of seamless melody. The movement is essentially cast as a melody in D Major and its restatement. highly decorated, without even a contrasting middle section. The violin offers “sighing” thirds near the end of the theme. These return as passionate outbursts in more decorated form, providing an emotional and expressive goal for the entire movement.
The third movement, in F-sharp minor, is emotionally more lightweight but with a sterner middle section. It is a cross between a scherzo and an intermezzo (Brahms generally avoided the driven or joke-filled scherzos of Beethoven and preferred to this kind of movement an emotional respite—even adding the words “with sentiment” to the tempo designation so that we don’t take it too seriously as a true, deep emotion.)
The extrovert finale gallops along in 6/8 time, beginning in an unexpectedly fierce manner and continuing at a great virtuoso pace. Here, perhaps, Brahms recalls the impetuous, dynamic youth that he no longer was at age fifty-five. But he also continues to play his tricks with the listener’s expectation. Following the energetic first theme, he moves to a chorale melody introduced by the piano alone. Then the exposition closes with a statement of the first theme in the dominant. When this moves to the home key, we expect that Brahms is repeating the entire exposition. But we are wrong—he suddenly drops the apparent repetition and moves on to a mysterious development section marked by nearly constant syncopation. At its climax, this picks up the opening theme at precisely the point where he had dropped it for the recapitulation. The coda closes Brahms’s last violin sonata with passionate excitement.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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