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Evnin Rising Stars I
Saturday October 29, 2011 at 8:00pm
Evnin Rising Stars II
Sunday October 30, 2011 at 4:00pm
Evnin Rising Stars Distinguished Artists:
Pamela Frank, Director, violin; Kim Kashkashian, viola; Peter Wiley, cello
Evnin Rising Stars:
Nikki Chooi, violin; Ying Xue, violin; Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu, violin; Rose Armbrust Griffin, viola; Philip Kramp, viola; Jeonghyoun Christine Lee, cello; Alice Yoo, cello; Andrew Tyson, piano
Now in its twentieth year, the Evnin Rising Stars Program is led by Artistic Director Pamela Frank, who searches for young musicians with the talent, personality, and musicality to benefit most fully from this program and places them in ensembles for an intense week of rehearsals and coaching sessions, culminating in two exciting public performances of masterpieces of the chamber music literature. Pam Frank is assisted by Distinguished Artists: Kim Kashkashian and Peter Wiley, who mentor, coach, and perform with these young musicians helping to shape the next generation of collaborative music-making.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
String Quartet in B-flat Major, Hob. III:44, Op. 50, No. 1 (Prussian Quartets, No. 1)
Whenever a composer is as prolific as Haydn was in the realm of the symphony, the string quartet, the piano sonata, or the piano trio, there is the strong tendency to describe a given work as, say, a “typical Haydn string quartet.” But Haydn’s unfailing invention makes each work “typical” only in finding original solutions to musical issues posed by the thematic and harmonic ideas contained in the piece. Charles Rosen, in his splendid book The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, explicitly compares the opening movement of Haydn’s B-flat quartet, Opus 50, No. 1, with that of its successor, Opus 50, No. 2, in a dramatic demonstration of how different two movements can be, even though they both fall into “typical” sonata form.
The most important structural feature of sonata form is a move away from the home key and the dramatic establishment of a new key, usually the dominant. In Opus 50, No. 1, Haydn seems to be unable to leave home; the tonic of B-flat appears in the cello, unaccompanied, for two full measures before anything else happens, and when the other instruments finally enter, they seem unable to dislodge the harmony from B-flat, and only by dint of repeated exertions do they finally seem to get the composition underway with a forced move to F. (By contrast, Opus 50, No. 2 seems not quite ever to be in the home key at all, but to be halfway to the dominant in the very first measure.) What follows, then, is based on Haydn’s sense of balance and on his extraordinary musical wit. After an exposition that seemed rooted in the tonic, the recapitulation soars to distant harmonic realms and returns unexpectedly through a back door, so that the “first theme” is already partly over before we realize it has begun.
Haydn’s slow movement is a simple theme with three variations in E-flat (the second variation actually goes to E-flat minor—six flats!—a key signature almost never found in the eighteenth-century). The simple, rocking melody is decorated on its repetitions by the first violin and later by the cello in a virtuosic outburst (a reminder that this quartet was composed for the cello-playing King Frederick II of Prussia).
The Menuetto is cast in a contrapuntal style, while the Trio is a striking contrast, with its almost bare texture, though it has one of the best jokes in the piece. The Trio begins with a staccato descending arpeggio in the first violin; when that material is repeated at the end of the section, the second violin tries to take it over, but in the lower octave. The first violin “corrects” the pitch level, but in so doing enters late rhythmically, so the two instruments stagger along together.
The finale has one of those lively tunes that signals the likelihood of a rondo, but it is a quite thoroughly worked-out sonata pattern with more witty surprises—not the least of which is the somewhat abrupt ending that turns out not to be an ending at all. After two and a half measures of silence, the players go right on as if nothing had happened to offer more and more emphatic cadences, finally ending with an almost desperate energy to bring the quartet to its close.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
String Trio, Op. 45
On August 2, 1946, Arnold Schoenberg suffered a collapse and nearly died, his heartbeat only being restored by means of an emergency injection. He was seventy-one years old and had recently been turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant that would at last have allowed him to give up teaching and concentrate on composition.
Yet only eighteen days after this near-fatal collapse, he began composing the string trio, completing it five weeks later, on September 23. His last large-scale composition before this had been his Piano Concerto of 1942, a composition of marked lyrical tendencies in which Schoenberg had evidently bade adieu to the principles of sonata form that had attracted him repeatedly over the years (despite the non-tonal character of so much of his work and the fact that sonata form is predicated on opposition of tonalities).
The String Trio is not devoid of lyricism, but it is filled with the greatest possible contrasts exploited to the fullest in a powerful expressionistic style that recalls some of the composer’s much earlier music. At the same time it evolves as a kind of continuous melodic variation (which can also be seen as shaped into a free sonata form arrangement), which helps bring the diverse elements into a coherent shape. The interaction of expressionistic violence with a more lyrical serenity seems, in a way, to be a fusion of Schoenberg’s earlier and later styles in one piece.
The work is in a single movement, subdivided into three “parts” separated by two episodes (the episodes have a different serial construction, though this is not likely to be evident to the casual listener). Part One is a wild introduction, filled with dramatic chords and arpeggios; the episode that follows is essentially lyric, though occasionally interrupted by explosive outbursts, and the whole can be seen as roughly the equivalent of a sonata exposition. Part Two makes several attempts to continue in the lyrical mode and finally unfolds an extended melodic idea. The second episode is basically disruptive. These elements may be regarded as developmental. Then Part Three, beginning much like Part One (and sounding like a kind of recapitulation) selectively reworks aspects of the entire piece, concluding in a coda that restates the extended lyric passage from Part Two, closing in a calm far removed from the hysteria of the beginning.
Schoenberg told Thomas Mann that the Trio was in some ways a reflection of the impact, both physical and psychological, of the serious illness from which he had so recently recovered.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60
Although the C-minor piano quartet was not published until 1875, Brahms had much earlier composed a movement in C sharp minor that contains the essential musical ideas of the later work’s opening movement. The first version was tried out privately in November 1856 with an ensemble including violinist Joseph Joachim, who wrote to Brahms the following week suggesting several changes, but nothing more seems to have come of the work at that time. In any case, Brahms was not yet prepared to publish it, and when he did return to the quartet nearly two decades later, the finished product took a quite different form. The changes are hard to document precisely, since the composer, following his usual custom, destroyed the score of the early version; it is, at least, clear that the last two movements were composed in the winter of 1873 74 (Brahms indicated as much in a manuscript catalogue of his works), while the first two movements are listed as having been composed “earlier.” It seems that Brahms retained the original exposition of his first movement in all essential details (though moving it a half step downward) but then completely rewrote the remainder of the movement.
The dark turmoil of the opening movement hints at the emotional pressure under which Brahms composed the early version during the terrible last days of his friend Robert Schumann or immediately after Schumann’s death. The intensely personal character of the music is also indicated by the composer’s comment in a letter transmitting the early version to Theodor Billroth: “This quartet is only communicated as a curiosity, say as an illustration to the last chapter of the Man with the Blue Jacket and Yellow Vest.” The reference is to the despairing young man in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in the last chapter of which Werther commits suicide. Whether or not Brahms himself ever seriously contemplated taking his own life, he seems to have found this music too personal for immediate publication, too openly revealing of his hopeless love for Clara Schumann. But distance in time gave him enough objectivity to rework it into the present form.
In the final version of 1875, the fiercely energetic opening movement features a downward-tending motive in the strings evoking a tragic power. The only moments of relative calm come in the treatment of the second theme; its major-key melody generates some immediate variations, but it cannot overcome the mood of the main theme.
The Scherzo is a kind of pendant to the Allegro, continuing in the same key with the same kind of ferocity. Although we know that it was composed “earlier” than the last two movements, it would be sheer conjecture to say whether it formed part of the original C-sharp minor version or came from a different uncompleted composition or was written independently.
The Andante, in the surprisingly bright key of E Major, was once believed to have been part of the original version of the score and thus probably to represent an avowal of the composer’s love for Clara. But Brahms’s catalogue and Clara’s own response to the music after she had first heard it in 1875 make it clear that this movement was new. It has long been regarded as one of the highest peaks of Brahmsian melodic writing.
The finale runs almost in perpetual motion. Its ending, despite the major key and tranquillo marking, does not entirely banish the memory of things past. Perhaps the finest tribute to the composer’s constructive powers in this quartet came from Clara Schumann in 1875: “He had already written the first two movements earlier...and now the last two are also entirely works of genius: an intensification right up to the end that fairly takes your breath away. It is strange how the mood remains unified, despite the quite different dates of the various movements.”
-Program notes © Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
String Quintet No. 1 in B-flat Major, K. 174
Mozart’s String Quintets are among the most powerful and treasurable works of his wide-ranging chamber music output. There are five quintets dating from the last four years of his life, and we must ask, however vain the question might be, whether additional years of life would have induced him to return again and again to the same medium until he had turned out at least as many glorious string quintets as he had already composed splendid string quartets, or fine violin sonatas. Certainly the record of the years from 1787 to 1791 suggests that he had become deeply committed to the quintet medium, possibly because he was enamored of the relatively darker and mellower sonority obtained by adding a second viola to the standard genre of the string quartet.
But in 1773, nearly fifteen years before returning to the medium for those late masterpieces, Mozart composed his first string quintet, K.174. This is clearly an early work, though with Mozart, even pieces written at an astonishingly youthful age have many points of interest, both in their own right as musical compositions and also as indications of the kind of music that particularly influenced the young Mozart at various stages of his career. In this case, the influence seems to come from Michael Haydn, the younger brother of Joseph, who was a colleague of Mozart’s in Salzburg, and who had composed a string quintet—with two violas—in C in February 1773. The Mozarts, father and son, were still in Italy at the time, but they returned to Salzburg on March 13 and must have heard the new work soon after, because it wasn’t long before Wolfgang began his own viola quintet, in the key of B-flat.
Both Haydn’s quintet and Mozart’s make much of a charming interplay between the first violin and the first viola. The following December Mozart revised his work considerably. The first two movements remained unchanged, but he wrote an entirely new trio designed to produce echo effects between the parts, and a finale that he reconsidered completely in a contrapuntal guise, using part of the theme he had composed for the original version. The changes, too, seem to have been inspired by another Michael Haydn quintet, in the key of G, which was completed on December 1. (We know that Mozart retained a warm feeling for his colleague’s quintets, because he played in an ensemble that performed both of them in Munich in October 1777.)
In this first string quintet, Mozart was still learning to use the darker sonority afforded by two violas, and—even though there are only the four “standard” movements for a serious work of chamber music—he wrote a divertimento-like piece in a wide mixture of styles, as if experimenting with its possibilities. Thematic material in the first is frequently tossed back and forth between first violin and first viola (as if to celebrate the latter’s independence, while the second viola plays the more normal kind of harmonic filler part). Yet Mozart offers various reworkings of the texture—the two violins together over the three lower parts in slower motion; the two violins echoed by the two violas over a bass line in the cello, and so on.
The Adagio, with muted strings, also emphasizes the thematic interplay of first violin and first viola, with a decorative air throughout. And in the Menuetto, too, the first violin and viola intone the thematic material, while second violin and viola support with chordal arpeggiation, and the cello punctuates the bass line. The Trio, one of the last parts to be composed, breaks up into a series of short echo effects, though still pairing the firsts and seconds as in the earlier movements.
Mozart evidently felt the need for a real capstone for the quintet, because he recast his original finale (retaining its running sixteenth-note theme as a countersubject) into a lively and cheerful rondo with contrapuntal passages to show off his technique. Here, for almost the first time in the piece, the violins play together and the violas answer together in the scurrying sixteenth-note figure, while elsewhere Mozart groups the instruments in still other, delightfully unpredictable, ways for a delightful conclusion.
GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924)
Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor, Op. 45
Gabriel Fauré, born in the south of France, studied in Paris not at the hidebound Conservatoire, but rather at the École Niedermeyer, where he received an unusually broad musical education in three respects that set him apart from the products of the “official” school: a thorough understanding of older music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, familiarity with the German tradition, including Bach and Beethoven, and a more-than-nodding acquaintance with such dangerous moderns as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner—this last element through the good offices of the young Saint-Saëns, who from 1861 on was professor of piano at the school. Fauré himself went on to become one of the most distinguished teachers of the turn of the century era (his students included Ravel and Enesco as well as Nadia Boulanger, who became a singularly influential teacher in her own right).
French music in the late nineteenth century was divided into highly politicized camps—the Wagnerians, the Franckists, the followers of Massenet, and others. Fauré kept largely to himself, not joining any clique; even after making the customary pilgrimage to Bayreuth to hear the Ring, he revealed almost no influence of the experience in his own work. Thus his work has always stood somewhat apart, sometimes overlooked and misunderstood, though certain partisans—notably Nadia Boulanger—have ardently promoted it.
Fauré’s greatest strengths lay in the realms of song and chamber music; many of his works in both categories are treasured by performers and familiar to listeners. The First Piano Quartet is one of his most frequently performed compositions. Oddly enough, the Second Quartet, which can lay claim to being one of his finest works, is heard less often. Fauré’s biographer Robert Orledge considers the writing of this piece to mark Fauré’s attainment of full artistic maturity. We know nothing about its composition, only that it was premiered in a concert of the Société Nationale on January 22, 1887, with Fauré at the piano. He presumably composed it in the preceding year or so, though all details are lacking. The quartet is also the only major Fauré work that experiments with cyclic form, an approach that was all the rage around him (Liszt and Franck are the classic exponents, though Fauré’s quartet is far more natural in the progression of its ideas, less overtly rhetorical in mood than so many works of the earlier composers).
The first movement (Allegro molto moderato) opens with a long and flowing unison string melody of ardent contour from which much of the ensuing discussion is derived. The viola introduces the secondary theme (really a new version of shapes drawn from the opening melody). As the development begins, viola and cello in octaves begin an entirely new theme that intertwines with the opening material through great harmonic adventures. A stretto drawn from the secondary theme provides the basis for a crescendo that brings in the recapitulation. Fauré puts particular weight on his coda, which consistently slips away from the tonic and needs to recover itself to the very last.
The second movement (Allegro molto) is a violent C-minor scherzo, which, after a few bars of introduction, grows out of a breathless, syncopated theme in the piano. It is all forte or fortissimo, unusually vehement for Fauré. What appears to be a lyrical contrasting theme in the strings is another version of material from the beginning of the first movement; at the same time it is related to the scale passage of the scherzo theme. Another lyrical idea, functioning as a proper second theme, is still another variant of the theme that opened the quartet. There is a quiet reprise.
The third movement (Adagio non troppo) grew out of Fauré’s memories of the sounds of bells heard years before in the garden of his family’s home in Cadirac. He was a quiet child who found communication with his parents, and especially his father, difficult. He would retreat to the garden and absorb its Mediterranean atmosphere for hours on end. Later he claimed in a letter that the recollection of the Cadirac bells found its way into the opening music of this movement “almost involuntarily.” It is a serene adagio, of which Aaron Copland (a Boulanger pupil who no doubt learned his Fauré under her tutelage) wrote in the Musical Quarterly for 1924: “Its beauty is truly classic if we define classicism as intensity on a background of calm.” It is a calm that stands outside the passions of the other movements, partaking in no way of the musical material they share.
The finale (Allegro molto) returns to energy, passion, violence. It has a relentless forward drive, unlike anything else in Faure. A theme of surging triplets drives the music along, and the contrasting ideas recall themes originally heard in the scherzo or the first movement. Fauré keeps in reserve for the coda a grand crescendo and a massive più mosso restatement of second subject, now in a triumphant G Major.
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
String Quintet in C, D. 956, Op. posth. 163
Virtually nothing is known of the history of this, Schubert’s greatest chamber composition, except that he turned to it in August of 1828, only months before his tragically premature death in November, and that he probably completed the piece in September. We have no idea why he chose the particular ensemble (with two cellos, as Boccherini had used in his quintets, rather than the two violas Mozart preferred), nor if he wrote it at someone’s request. He almost certainly never heard a performance, and the work was not, in fact, published until a full quarter-century after the composer’s death (when it was listed as Opus 163, a pure invention of the publisher’s). Still, it remains the only truly great composition for a string quintet with two cellos; it outclasses Boccherini by a long shot and remained so overwhelming an example that even those composers who might have used it as a model gave up in the end and wrote their quintets with a second viola. Brahms, in particular, actually brought to conclusion the composition of a string quintet in F minor directly modeled on Schubert’s work; but he finally converted it into two alternative forms: the F-minor quintet, Opus 34a (for string quartet and piano), and the sonata for two pianos, Opus 34b. Both versions retain clear references to their Schubertian inspiration, above all in the treatment of Neapolitan harmonic turns, of which Schubert’s quintet is the unparalleled model.
Schubert’s ear for harmonic color is exploited here to a degree hitherto unknown. The first three chords are a good example: a C-Major triad followed by a diminished-seventh chord on C, followed by another C-Major triad to end the first part of the phrase. To an earlier composer, the diminished chord would have demanded harmonic movement, its tensions would have insisted on resolution. Here, the chord simply is, a characteristic sound in its own right, possibly suggesting foreboding, or immensity, or mysticism—but not harmonic movement. Soon these three chords become a kind of motto embedded in the principal theme.
Another unforgettable example of Schubert’s search for richer harmonic color—indeed the emotional high point of the first movement—is the arrival at the second theme. Conventional harmonic practice decreed that the secondary key must be G if the tonic is C. Schubert appears to accede to this practice with a vigorous modulation to G, but the moment he lands on it, he leaves the two cellos hanging on the note G without other accompaniment, and the second cello unexpectedly melts down the scale to E-flat, whereupon the cellos duet in a lush new theme in that key. But there is another surprise: having now convinced us that the secondary material would not be in the expected key, Schubert modulates yet again, this time to G, for still another thematic statement and the conclusion of the exposition.
As the quintet proceeds, what are called “Neapolitan relationships” come increasingly to the fore; these occur when one key seems to “lean” on another that is a half-step lower. In the eighteenth century, such relationships occurred only briefly at the cadence to provide a colorful way of approaching the dominant. But Schubert expands the significance of these relationships so that entire sections of movements “lean” on the home key, giving a much wider and more piquant harmonic range, turned to vivid expressive use.
The slow movement begins in E Major with an unearthly stasis of almost mystical quality; the middle section is a contrastingly nervous passage in F minor, the Neapolitan relationship to the main key of E.
Even more striking, perhaps, is the scherzo, which is as extroverted as one could wish for, only to have as its contrasting Trio a daringly imaginative slow section in D-flat (Neapolitan to the home key of C), asking urgent questions for which no answers are forthcoming. And even the questions are brusquely swept away in the return to the scherzo proper.
The finale, though it is in many respects lighter in character and expressive depth than the middle two movements, continues to exploit these relationships with sudden changes of harmonic color, which underline the shifts of emotional intensity. The surprising last two notes—a unison appoggiatura D-flat falling to a solid C—encapsulate the essence of this harmonic relationship.
-Program notes © Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com.)
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