JULY 24 INTRODUCTIONS: FRANK HUANG
Thursday, 7:30pm
Spanish Courtyard
Tickets: $25.00, $15.00
Frank Huang, violin; Gilles Vonsattel, piano
Since winning First Prize in the 2003 Naumburg International Violin Competition, violinist Frank Huang has become recognized as an "important artist" (San Francisco Chronicle) of his generation. In a program of masterpieces, he made his Caramoor recital debut with fellow Caramoor Virtuoso and Naumberg Laureate: pianist Gilles Vonsattel.
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ABOUT THE MUSIC
Claude Debussy
1862-1918
Sonata for Violin and Piano
Late in his life Debussy planned a large chamber music project to consist of six sonatas, of which only the first three were actually composed. So sure was he of the overall scope of his plan, however, that the three completed works were published under the title Six Sonates pour divers instruments. Sonata No. 1 was for cello and piano, No. 2 for flute, viola, and harp, and No. 3 for violin and piano. The manuscript of this last work contained a brief note looking forward to the next item in the series. “The fourth will be for oboe, horn, and harpsichord”—but no fourth sonata was ever completed. (If Debussy had indeed finished a work with such unusual scoring, he would have been among the handful of musicians—along with Falla and Poulenc—who contributed to the revival of the harpsichord early in the 20th century.)
The Violin Sonata turned out to be Debussy’s final completed work. He composed it in 1917 and appeared himself as the pianist, along with violinist Gaston Poulet, at the premiere, which took place in Paris on May 5, 1917. That event turned out to be his last public appearance as a performer. The completion of the sonata had given Debussy a good deal of trouble, the finale proving especially intractable. A month after the premiere, he wrote to a friend, during that flush of post partum dissatisfaction that often overtakes creative artists after they have brought a new creation into the world, that he had finished the sonata “only to get rid of the thing” at the insistence of his publisher. The sonata indeed betrays signs of conflicting forces in the composer’s approach, which may account for his decided coolness—whether to follow the demands of form with a “classical” recapitulation in the first movement or a freer treatment of the opening material where recapitulation is expected. Nonetheless the work contains many beauties, starting right at the outset, where the listener can hardly guess that the music is marked Allegro vivo, since the long note values give a first impression of relaxation until the violin really gets underway. The middle movement, in particular, is a splendid exercise in the fantastic (an element that always appealed to Debussy), and the violin writing throughout reveals his familiarity with the virtuoso showpieces of the nineteenth century.
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George Enescu
1881-1955
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 3 in A minor, Op. 25
Few things can be more damaging to an artist than overwhelming popularity. The Rumanian composer George Enescu (as an adult living in Paris and working internationally, he came to spell his name in French, as Georges Enesco) was not only one of the finest violinists of his generation, but also a superb composer and a fine pianist and conductor. His violin playing was in such demand that it frequently limited his compositional activity. But the real artistic problem of his life came from the simple fact that his two Rumanian Rhapsodies, published together in 1901, when he was only twenty, were so overwhelmingly popular that they drove virtually all of his other compositions into the shade—and these include an extraordinary opera, Oedipe (after Sophocles, regarded by some critics as one of the greatest operas of the century), three symphonies., choral music and songs, and a substantial amount of chamber music.
Enescu began playing the violin at the age of four, and the following year (once he learned how musical notation worked) he began composing. At seven he entered the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, where he also studied piano, organ, and cello. He absorbed Wagner through Richter’s performances and Brahms through playing in the conservatory orchestra with the composer present. He graduated in 1893—he was twelve!—but stayed an extra year for more work in composition with Joseph Fuchs. After this Viennese experience, he entered the Paris Conservatory in 1895 and studied there with Massenet and Fauré. He wrote his first orchestra piece there, Rumanian Poem, and when he conducted it in Bucharest in March 1888, he was instantly hailed as a significant figure in Rumanian culture.
He graduated from the Paris Conservatory in 1899 and began the thoroughly bifurcated existence that marked most of his life—dividing his location between Rumania and France and his activity between performing and composing. In the years before World War I he tended to tour as a violinist or as part of a chamber ensemble (including such partners as Alfred Cortot and Pablo Casals), then returned to Rumania for a quiet summer of composing in the countryside. He spent most of the war years building the musical life of his homeland (including the founding of an orchestra in 1917, and later, in 1921, of an opera company).
Enescu had an electric personality that was commented on by almost everyone who met him. When he toured the United States in 1925, he greatly impressed the nine-year-old Yehudi Menuhin, who later moved from San Francisco to Europe to study with him. Other violinists who benefited from Enescu’s teaching included Christian Ferras, Ivry Gitlis, Arthur Grumiaux, and Ida Haendel.
One reason, perhaps, for the relative lack of renown of his own compositions was his modesty about his own music as well as his humble regard toward the music of others.
At least one aspect of his chamber music output is relatively well known: his three sonatas for violin and piano, because his principal performing medium was the violin. He composed his last violin sonata in 1926, subtitled “in the Rumanian folk style.” This does not by any means indicate that he simply assembles a medley of folk tunes. On the contrary, rather like Bartók at about the same time, he developed a musical language that seems to have absorbed the entire melos of Rumanian music within it. His characteristic mood (evident in the first two movements of the sonata) is the doina, also called the hora lunga, or “long song,” a form of very personal music-making with long drawn-out lines in a kind of parlando delivery, as a sort of instrumental recitative.
The opening movement (Moderato malinconico) lives up to the descriptive “melancholy” in the tempo marking, starting with a gradual unfolding of figures in a “gapped” scale (one that skips over certain notes, used in the doina) and decorative ornamentations often found in improvised folk traditions, in a slow tempo. The violin tends to sustain long, plangent notes against a more lively rhythmic accompaniment in the piano, like a soulful balladeer at some kind of festivity, and even the occasional bursts of livelier activity from the violin quickly turn back to the more internalized lamentation that is the principal mood of the movement.
The piano creates a steady ostinato on a single note at the beginning of the Andante sostenuto e misterioso, while the violin again sings long notes in a tone of lamentation, soaring over the pulsations in the piano. But a passage of a mysterious chromatic scale (like a howling wind) emphasizes the eerie character of the movement. Enescu’s music continually develops small motivic figures in varying tempi and moods, from plangent to passionate.
The slow movement—Andante sostenuto e misterioso—begins with a chill, high keening in the violin over a repeated note in the piano. The steady pulsation of the piano continues at length as the violin sings its doina, in a mysterious sustained lamentation. Suddenly a burst of lively activity changes the mood entirely to a vigorous dance character, then turning into another slower song of passionate urgency.
The last movement (Allegro con brio, ma non troppo mosso) takes on a real dance character, with a music designed for stomping and dancing, microtonal decorations, and filled with life.
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Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Sonata No. 9 in A Major for piano and violin, Op. 47 (Kreutzer)
The nickname of Beethoven’s Opus 47 violin sonata—“Kreutzer”—immortalizes the wrong person. Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to a brilliant twenty-four year old mulatto violinist, George Polgreen Bridgetower, son of an African father and a German or Polish mother, with whom the composer played the first performance, and whose playing he admired and recommended to others. But when the violinist and composer had a falling out—apparently over a woman, though no details are known—Beethoven changed his dedication, and the work was published with an inscription to a famous French violin virtuoso Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831), who, as far as we know, never played it.
The composition of Opus 47 began with the finale, which Beethoven wrote as the last movement of an earlier sonata, Opus 30, No. 1. But he decided that the movement was too brilliant for that work, so he reserved it for a later time. He sketched the remaining movements of the Kreutzer Sonata while also working on his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives in early 1803, shortly before he met Bridgetower. Yet, as sometimes happened, he did not complete it until the actual day of the performance, May 24, 1803. Only the finale had been professionally copied for the soloist. As Beethoven’s amanuensis Ferdinand Ries recalled:
One morning Beethoven sum-moned me at half after four o’clock and said: “Copy the violin part of the first Allegro quickly.” (His regular copyist was otherwise engaged.) The pianoforte part was noted down only here and there in parts. Bridgetower had to play the marvelously beautiful theme and variations in F [the second movement] from Beethoven’s manuscript at the concert, because there was no time to copy it.
Bridgetower himself recalled that he boldly inserted one change—virtuoso’s prerogative—into the first movement, a change that seems to have had Beethoven’s approval, though it did not appear in the printed score. After a slow introduction, the two instruments take off in a Presto phrase that comes to a stop on a fermata at the ninth measure; the phrase is then restated in a new scoring, and when the fermata arrives, the pianist plays a brief, cadenza-like arpeggio. Bridgetower recalled in his memoirs that, when that movement arrived in the repeat of the exposition, he played the arpeggios on the violin, in imitation of what he had heard Beethoven play the first time. The composer leaped up from the piano, embraced him, and cried, “Noch einmal, mein lieber Bursch!”—“Once again, my dear boy!” When it came to the performance, Beethoven simply held the C major chord at the repeat and let Bridgetower play the little cadenza. This treatment of the passage, however, was not the one Beethoven finally published.
The Kreutzer Sonata is one of the first great violin sonatas expressly designed, in breadth of scope and virtuosic fireworks, for public performance in a concert hall. Prior to this time, chamber music—and the violin sonata in particular—was more often considered something for home consumption, with musicians playing either for their private enjoyment or for the entertainment of a small group of guests. But a piece to be played in a hall seating hundreds of listeners requires a totally different scale of projection, and the Kreutzer Sonata is one of the earliest works to respond to the rise of public concerts of chamber music. In this respect it corresponds to Beethoven’s Razumovsky string quartets, Opus 59, and to the Waldstein and Appassionata piano sonatas, Opus 53 and 57 respectively, in recognizing the changing audience for chamber music and the changing circumstances of performance.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Frank Huang, violin ~ Since winning the first prize of the 2003 Walter W. Naumburg Foundation’s Violin Competition and the 2000 Hannover International Violin Competition, Frank Huang has developed a major career as a violin virtuoso. At the age of eleven, he performed with the Houston Symphony Orchestra in a nationally broadcast concert and has since performed with orchestras throughout the world, including the Cleveland Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony, NDR-Radio Philharmonic Orchestra of Hannover, Amadeus Chamber Orchestra and the Genoa Orchestra. He has performed on NPR’s Performance Today, Good Morning America and CNN’s American Morning with Paula Zahn. Mr. Huang’s first commercial recording, comprised of Fantasies by Schubert, Ernst, Schoenberg and Waxman, was released to critical acclaim on Naxos in the fall of 2003.
He has had great success in competitions since the age of fifteen with top prize awards in the Premio Paganini International Violin Competition and the Indianapolis International Violin Competition. He received Gold Medal Awards in the Kingsville International Competition, the Irving M. Klein International Competition and the D’Angelo International Competition. In addition to his solo career, Mr. Huang is deeply committed to chamber music. He has attended the Marlboro Music Festival, Ravinia’s Steans Institute, The Seattle Chamber Music festival, and the Caramoor Festival, and has also been a member of the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMSII program. He is also the leader and concertmaster of the Sejong Soloists, a conductorless string ensemble based in New York City. Recent performances include concerts in Wigmore Hall, (London) Salle Cortot, (Paris) Kennedy Center, (Washington) and Alice Tully Hall (new York), where he gave the world premiere of Donald Martino's Sonata for Solo Violin.
Frank Huang studied with Robert Mann at The Juilliard School, with Donald Weilerstein at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and with Fredell Lack.
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Gilles Vonsattel, piano ~ Swiss-born pianist Gilles Vonsattel, winner of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation's 2002 International Piano Competition, made his Lincoln Center debut that year at Alice Tully Hall, and has appeared as soloist with the Utah Symphony, Naples Philharmonic, the Grand Rapids Symphony, the National Symphony of Ireland, the Boston Pops, and the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève. With repertoire that ranges from Bach's Art of the Fugue to Xenakis, Mr. Vonsattel is an artist of uncommon breadth equally at home in solo and chamber music. He has performed in major venues such as Boston's Symphony Hall, Cleveland's Severance Hall, Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, the Benedict Music Tent at the Aspen Music Festival, Tokyo's Opera City Hall, and Geneva's Victoria Hall. Mr. Vonsattel’s 2007-08 season included recitals at La Roque d’Anthéron, at the Musée d’Orsay, the Davos Festival, Zürich’s Tonhalle, at Warsaw’s Chopin Festival, at the La Jolla Music Society, and at Atlanta’s Spivey Hall, as well as concerto and solo performances in Prague, Bratislava, Basel, and Poznan. In 2008-09 Mr. Vonsattel appears at the festivals of Bastad, Sion, and Ernen, while returning to the Caramoor and Davos festivals, and will perform Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Warsaw Philharmonic under Antoni Witt. He makes numerous appearances at New York’s Lincoln Center under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and will tour Switzerland with the Musikcollegium Winterthur.
The top prizewinner at the 2006 Geneva International Music Competition, Mr. Vonsattel is also a laureate of the Cleveland and Dublin Piano Competitions. In 2008 he was a recipient of an Avery Fisher career grant. He has been heard frequently on National Public Radio’s Performance Today and on Radio France Musique. He gave the world premiere of Ned Rorem’s Sound Points at his second recital at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. Recent chamber music appearances include debuts at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He has participated in the Aspen Music Festival and the Music Academy of the West. Mr. Vonsattel has appeared in recital at the Caramoor International Festival and joined the Caramoor Virtuosi in 2007. Deeply committed to the chamber music repertoire, he is a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s prestigious Chamber Music Society Two residency for young artists, and has collaborated with artists such as Kim Kashkashian, Ida Kavafian, Cho-Liang Lin, Paul Neubauer, David Shifrin, Gary Hoffman, Carter Brey, and Yo-Yo Ma.
Mr. Vonsattel has shown a significant interest in expanding the conventional classical concert experience, most recently opening for Eluvium and Amiina at New York’s Wordless Music Series. He continues to be deeply involved in classical music outreach in the United States, giving masterclasses at universities and schools.
Mr. Vonsattel’s recording of Liszt solo works and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 with L’Orchestre de Chambre de Genève was released in October of 2007 on the PanClassics label to critical acclaim. His recording of Bartók’s Contrasts (Deutsche Gramophon) with members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is available for download on iTunes.
After studying with pianist David Deveau in Boston, Mr. Vonsattel received his B.A. in political science and economics from Columbia University and his M.M. from The Juilliard School, where he worked with Jerome Lowenthal.
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