Chamber Music Programs

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CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

2016 SEASON

WELCOME

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hamber music has always been the heart and soul of Bravo! Vail, and I am so thrilled that audiences have embraced it to the point that it warrants its very own program book, which you are holding in your hands! Director of Artistic Planning Jacqueline Taylor and I put these chamber programs together with so much love and care, and also the hope that all our patrons will experience the visceral intimacy and magical collaborations that are the hallmark of great chamber music performances.

As you can see in this book, we have a tremendous diversity of musical offerings. Our Chamber Music Series presents Anne-Marie McDermott ARTISTIC DIRECTOR repertoire both lighthearted and powerful. Classically Uncorked features exciting and innovative new music from around the world, performed in a fantastic social environment. Our Free Concert Series brings hour-long concerts throughout the Vail valley, often showcasing brilliant young musicians including our 2016 Piano Fellows, whom I have personally selected and mentored. As with all our programs, it is our privilege to introduce these wonderful artists to you, and to share these inspiring performances.

Welcome, and enjoy!

CONTENTS CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES.................................................................................... 2 CLASSICALLY UNCORKED SERIES............................................................ 12

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FREE CONCERT SERIES..................................................................................... 20 SPECIAL EVENT: INUKSUIT............................................................................. 54 MEET THE ARTISTS............................................................................................... 56 ALL PROGRAM NOTES Š 2016 DR. RICHARD E. RODDA

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CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

UP CLOSE & MUSICAL EXPERIENCE CHAMBER LIKE NEVER BEFORE

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RAVO! VAIL’S CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES offers something for music lovers of all persuasions. Every Tuesday night in July, audiences enjoy well-loved masterworks and new discoveries of the chamber music repertoire, performed by members of the resident orchestras alongside world-renowned guest artists and ensembles, all in the spectacular setting of the Donovan Pavilion, a stunning venue with expansive mountain valley views. Experience chamber music as it was meant to be heard: in a beautiful, intimate environment, with acclaimed artists, among friends.

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AUGUSTIN HADELICH, VIOLIN (page 4)

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Hadelich, McDermott

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Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge...................................... 8

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Bruckner 7........................................ 10

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TOP: ZACHMAHONE.COM; FROM LEFT: © PAUL GLICKMAN; © LISA-MARIE MAZZUCCO

Philadelphia Plays Mozart & Brahms........................ 6

DOVER QUARTET (page 8)

ANNE-MARIE MCDERMOTT, PIANO (page 4) BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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CHAMBER MUSIC

HADELICH, McDERMOTT & THE DALLAS SYMPHONY Sonata No. 4 for Unaccompanied Violin in E minor, Op. 27, No. 4 (1924) EUGÈNE YSAŸE (1858-1931)

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ugène Ysaÿe (ee-sy-uh) was one of the most beloved musicians in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, a violinist revered by his peers and lionized by audiences, a teacher of immense influence, a conductor of international repute, and a composer of excellent skill. Ysaÿe’s most admired compositions are his six Sonatas for Unaccompanied Violin (Op. 27), which he was inspired to compose after hearing Joseph Szigeti play a Bach solo sonata in 1924. These Sonatas are in an advanced stylistic idiom influenced by the modern music of France, and call for feats of technical mastery that rival those required by the Solo Caprices of Paganini. The Sonata No. 4, dedicated to the celebrated Viennese violinist Fritz Kreisler, opens with two movements indebted to Bach’s model: an Allemanda of deep emotion and a Sarabande that winds around a ghostly, continuously repeating four-note figure in its middle voice. The Finale is a dazzling perpetuum mobile that recalls the Sarabande in its central episode.

Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56 (1932) SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

Prokofiev spent most of the 1920s in Paris, imbibing the bracing modernities of Stravinsky, Honegger, Poulenc, Milhaud and the other members of Les Six, and devoting himself exclusively to instrumental and orchestral composition; it was the longest period of his life that did not yield an opera or vocal work. By 1932, he had grown eager to return home to Russia, where he would have to hide his avant garde candle under a very tightly controlled “music for the masses” bushel, so his last works 4

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in Paris — Sonata for Two Violins (Op. 56), Symphonic Song (Op. 57) and Cello Concerto (Op. 58) — form a sort of farewell to the modernism that had been a prominent strain in his creative personality since his days at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Early in his career, Prokofiev classified his music into four distinct styles: classical or neo-classical; modern; toccata or motoric; and lyrical. The last three idioms figure in the Sonata for Two Violins: the harmonic language of the work is modern and plangently chromatic; the first and third movements are lyrical, the first haunting and introspective, the third flowing and dance-like; the second and fourth movements, brilliant and steely, are motoric, though the finale relaxes as the Sonata nears its end for a sweet echo of the main theme of the opening movement.

Last Round for Strings (1992, 1996) OSVALDO GOLIJOV (B. 1960)

Award-winning Argentinean-American composer Osvaldo Golijov wrote of Last Round, “Astor Piazzolla, the last great tango composer, was at the peak of his creativity when a stroke killed him in 1992. I composed Last Round in 1992 and 1996. The title of both the work and the opening movement — Last Round — is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, a metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla’s spirit to fight one more time (he got into fistfights throughout his life). The piece is conceived to evoke the sound of an idealized bandoneón.

The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh (it is actually a fantasy on the refrain of the song My Beloved Buenos Aires, composed by the legendary Carlos Gardel in the 1930s).

But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always

JUL in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.”

Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and Strings in C minor, Op. 35 (1933) DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)

05 TUESDAY JULY 5, 6:00PM CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

DONOVAN PAVILION In 1927, Joseph Stalin secured the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev, his two chief rivals for power in the Soviet Union. A year later, he ended Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” in favor of the first “Five Year Plan,” a scheme intended to industrialize and collectivize the nation under his leadership. Stalin’s dictates had serious consequences for all Russians (most devastatingly for those caught in the ghastly “purges” of the 1930s), not excluding artists and musicians. The period of almost Dadaist artistic experimentation in the 1920s came suddenly to an end when artists were instructed that they had “social tasks” to perform with their creations, and that “formalism” — the ill-defined Soviet term for avant-garde or personally expressive works — was forbidden.

To the genre of proletarian music, Shostakovich contributed the rattlingly jingoistic Second and Third Symphonies (To October, 1927 and The First of May, 1929), the ballets The Age of Gold (1930) and The Bolt (the former strongly anti-Fascist, the latter on an industrial theme), and the anti-bourgeois opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1930-1932, premiered 1934). A strain of sarcasm, carried over from the music of the early 1920s, is evident in some of these pieces, and was dominant in the scathing opera of 1930, The Nose, based on a story by Gogol.

The satirical quality appears again, balanced by the required “social realism” (described by one literary critic as “fundamentally optimistic” and “conservative”), in the Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, Op. 35 of 1933.

The Concerto’s opening Allegro moderato is in modified sonata form. The slow movement breathes a scented, nostalgic air. The following movement, an introduction to the finale, comprises two cadenzas for the soloist: the first is unaccompanied; the second, prefaced by a sad melody for the strings, is supported by the orchestra. The finale is a brilliant, bubbling affair of several episodes.

MUSICIANS FROM THE DALLAS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Lucas Aleman, violin Eunice Keem, violin Alexander Kerr, violin Nathan Olson, violin Nora Scheller, violin Lydia Umlauf, violin Ann Marie Brink, viola David Sywak, viola Theodore Harvey, cello Jennifer Humphreys, cello Brian Perry, bass Ryan Anthony, trumpet

Augustin Hadelich, violin Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

YSAŸE Sonata No. 4 for Unaccompanied Violin in E minor, Op. 27, No. 4 (13 minutes) Allemanda: Lento maestoso Sarabande: Quasi lento Finale: Presto ma non troppo

PROKOFIEV Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56 (14 minutes) Andante cantabile Allegro Commodo (quasi Allegretto) Allegro con brio

— INTERMISSION — GOLIJOV Last Round for Strings (14 minutes) Last Round: Movido, urgente Death of the Angels: Lentissimo

SHOSTAKOVICH Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and Strings in C minor, Op. 35 (22 minutes) Allegro moderato Lento Moderato Allegro con brio

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PHILADELPHIA PLAYS MOZART & BRAHMS Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano, Op. 100 (1886) JOHANNES BR AHMS (1833-1897)

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he A major Violin Sonata is one of Brahms’ most limpidly beautiful creations. It has been nicknamed “Thun,” for the place of its composition, and “Meistersinger,” because of the resemblance of its opening motive to Walther’s “Prize Song” in Wagner’s opera, but the most appropriate appellation was suggested by Robert Schauffler: “Song.”

Schauffler’s sobriquet not only notes the score’s richly lyrical nature but also recognizes Brahms’ use of several of his own songs as thematic material for the work.

The opening movement is a full sonata structure (the piano initiates both the principal and subsidiary themes), though it contains little of the dramatic catharsis often found in that form. This is rather music of comforting tranquility and warm sentiment that is as immediately accessible as any from Brahms’ later years. The Andante, with its episodes in alternating tempos, combines the functions of slow movement and scherzo, a structural modification Brahms had also tried in the F major String Quintet, Op. 88. The finale confirms the pervasive lyricism of the entire work.

Quintet in E-flat major for Horn, Violin, Two Violas and Cello, K. 407 (1782) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

Mozart completed this delightful Quintet on the last day of 1782 for the horn player Ignaz Joseph Leutgeb, an old friend of the Mozart family from Salzburg, where he was a colleague of Wolfgang and father Leopold in the orchestra of Archbishop Colloredo.

The occasion for which it was written is not known, nor is the reason he stocked the string 6

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quartet with two violas rather than the usual two violins. Perhaps the violas were chosen because they better complement the sonorous middle register of the horn than do violins, and also allow the lone violin to stand apart more easily from the ensemble. It is the horn, however, that is the featured instrument; indeed, the piece is virtually a miniature concerto. The opening sonata-form Allegro is marked by the beautifully calculated balances/ contrasts that abound in Mozart’s music: loud/ soft, horn/strings, chords/scales, martial/ lyrical. The dulcet second movement, though more Rococo than Romantic in expression, is sweet and touching. The finale is a bubbling rondo whose imposing technical demands are excellent testimony to the talent of Leutgeb as well as to the capabilities of the natural horn of the 18th century, when it was valveless and the player had to produce every note by manipulation of lip and hand alone, without any sort of mechanical aid.

Sextet in B-flat major for Two Violins, Two Violas and Two Cellos, Op. 18 (1860) JOHANNES BRAHMS

The Principality of Lippe-Detmold, midway between Frankfurt and Hamburg, was one of the leading centers of 19th-century German music. The reigning Prince, Leopold III, had a taste for music, which he was able to gratify by employing a permanent orchestra of 45 players that presented a broad spectrum of works from Mozart through Wagner. A great deal of chamber music was played by the principals of the orchestra, a choir was formed from members of the household and townsfolk, and guest artists were often asked to visit the court to perform with the resident forces. One such visitor was Clara Schumann, who not only performed but also gave piano lessons to one of the Prince’s sisters and to the sister of the Court Chamberlain. When Clara moved from

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12 Düsseldorf to Berlin in 1857, a year after her husband’s death, she recommended that her young friend, the composer Johannes Brahms, continue the ladies’ lessons. So taken were they with their 24-year-old teacher that they wrangled for him a position at court which included conducting the chorus and orchestra, participating in chamber music and, of course, continuing their instruction. The post was only for the three months of October through December, but the salary was sufficient to sustain Brahms in his modest life style in Hamburg for a full year. He returned again in 1858 and 1859.

The B-flat Sextet was conceived at Detmold in 1859, but largely composed between March and September of the following year. The work was first heard in Hanover in October 1860, played by a group under the direction of the composer’s friend and champion, the violinist Joseph Joachim. Daniel Gregory Mason noted that the work marked an important artistic and stylistic passage for Brahms, “unmistakably the moment of his musical adolescence.... It is the first piece of chamber music in which, freeing himself once for all from the subjectivity and turgidity of romanticism, he starts to explore the road of classical universality in beauty, in which he was to discover such unprecedented treasures.” The sextet summarizes essential characteristics of Brahms: effulgent Romantic emotional expression absolutely disciplined by impeccable Classical form. The B-flat Sextet is among the earliest indisputable evidences of Brahms, the master.

Brahms was absolutely profligate with fine melodies in the opening, sonata-form movement. The first-theme group comprises the lyrical cello strain given immediately at the beginning and a Ländler-like tune (with a dotted rhythm) played in close harmony; a wide-ranging cello melody and another dotted-rhythm motive provide contrast.

The development section is concerned just with the first-theme group motives, but all of the thematic material is returned in the recapitulation in heightened settings. The second movement is a theme with variations.

The closing Rondo, in its form and thematic material if not in its somewhat prolix workingout, is an homage to Mozart.

TUESDAY JULY 12, 6:00PM CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

DONOVAN PAVILION

MUSICIANS FROM THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA

Elina Kalendarova, violin David Kim, violin Che-Hung Chen, viola Burchard Tang, viola Yumi Kendall, cello Hai-Ye Ni, cello Jennifer Montone, horn

Tomer Gewirtzman, piano BRAHMS Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano, Op. 100 (21 minutes) Allegro amabile Andante tranquillo — Vivace — Andante — Vivace di più — Andante — Vivace Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante) MOZART Quintet in E-flat major for Horn, Violin, Two Violas and Cello, K. 407 (17 minutes) Allegro Andante Allegro

— INTERMISSION — BRAHMS Sextet in B-flat major for Two Violins, Two Violas and Two Cellos, Op. 18 (34 minutes) Allegro ma non troppo Andante, ma moderato Scherzo: Allegro molto Rondo: Poco Allegretto e grazioso

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BEETHOVEN’S GROSSE FUGE Grosse Fuge (“Great Fugue”) for String Quartet, Op. 133 (1825-1826) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

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he Grosse Fuge was originally the finale of the Op. 130 Quartet, but Beethoven replaced it with a more traditional finale a year after the work had puzzled its first hearers and prompted him to reconsider his original plan. The Fuge was published separately as Op. 133. Grand in scale and Promethean in thought, the Grosse Fuge bursts from the strict model of the Baroque genre by inextricably combining counterpoint, variation and thematic development: it is a virtual compendium of Beethoven’s mature techniques at their highest level. English musicologist Philip Radcliffe noted that the Grosse Fuge “is best understood if regarded not as a highly eccentric fugue, but as a kind of symphonic poem consisting of several contrasted but thematically related sections and containing a certain amount of fugal writing.”

String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, “From My Life” (1876) BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824-1884)

In June 1874, Smetana began suffering from severe headaches. This symptom came and went, and he noted no other physical problems until October. “One night I listened with great pleasure to Leo Delibes’ Le Roi l’a dit,” he later reported. “When I returned home after the last act, I sat at the piano and improvised for an hour on whatever came into my head. The following morning I was stone deaf.” Smetana was terrified. Among the projects that Smetana undertook after this life-altering setback was a string quartet he subtitled “From My Life.” On April 12, 1878, he sent an explanation of the expressive content of the E minor Quartet to his friend Josef 8

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Srb-Debrnov. “The first movement,” Smetana wrote, “depicts my youthful leanings toward art, the Romantic atmosphere, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define, and also a kind of warning of my future misfortune….The second movement, a quasi-polka, brings to mind the joyful days of youth when I composed dance tunes and was known everywhere as a passionate lover of dancing…. The third movement reminds me of the happiness of my first love, the girl who later became my wife…. The fourth movement describes the discovery that I could treat national elements in music, and my joy in following this path until it was checked by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness, the outlook into the sad future, the tiny rays of hope of recovery; but remembering all the promise of my early career, a feeling of regret.”

The finale realizes Smetana’s description with almost painful fidelity. For most of its length, the movement follows a buoyant folkish course, but then the music is suddenly cut off.

A whirring in the lower strings and a piercing sound in the first violin follows. “This long insistent note owes its origin to this: it is the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tone which, in 1874, announced the beginning of my deafness. I permitted myself this little joke because it was so disastrous to me.” The somber music of the opening movement is recalled, a halting attempt to resume the dance fails, and the Quartet comes to a tragic end, fading into silence.

Quintet in F minor for Piano and String Quartet, Op. 34 (1862-1864) JOHANNES BR AHMS (1833-1897)

Brahms began the work that became the Piano Quintet in early 1862 as a string quintet with two cellos, the same scoring as Schubert’s incomparable C major Quintet, and by August he had the first three movements ready to send to his friend and mentor Clara Schumann

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and to the violinist Joseph Joachim. They both responded enthusiastically at first, but expressed reservations about the piece during the following months. “The details of the work show some proof of overpowering strength,” Joachim noted, “but what is lacking, to give me pure pleasure, is, in a word, charm.” By February 1863, the String Quintet had been recast as a Sonata for Two Pianos, which Brahms performed with Karl Tausig at a concert in Vienna on April 17, 1864. The premiere met with little favor. Clara continued to be delighted with the work’s musical substance, but thought that “it cannot be called a Sonata. The first time I tried the work I had the feeling that it was an arrangement.... Please, remodel it once more!” One final time, during the summer of 1864, Brahms revised the score, this time as the Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, an ensemble suggested to him by the conductor Hermann Levi. “You have turned a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty, a masterpiece of chamber music,” Levi wrote.

The Quintet’s opening movement, tempestuous and tragic in mood, is in a tightly packed sonata form. The outer sections of the second movement’s three-part form (A–B–A) are based on a gentle, lyrical strain in sweet, close-interval harmonies, while the central portion uses a melody incorporating an octave-leap motive. The Scherzo contains three motivic elements: a rising theme of vague rhythmic identity; a snapping motive in strict, dotted rhythm; and a march-like strain in full chordal harmony. These three components are juxtaposed throughout the movement. The central trio grows from a theme that is a lyrical transformation of the Scherzo’s chordal march strain. The Finale opens with a pensive slow introduction fueled by deeply felt chromatic harmonies. The body of the movement, in fast tempo, is a hybrid of rondo and sonata forms. Despite the buoyant, Gypsy flavor of the movement’s thematic material, the tragic tenor is maintained until the closing page.

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DOVER QUARTET Joel Link, violin Bryan Lee, violin Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola Camden Shaw, cello Anne-Marie McDermott, piano BEETHOVEN Grosse Fuge for String Quartet, Op. 133 (17 minutes) Fugue: Allegro — Meno mosso e moderato — Allegro molto e con brio — Meno mosso e moderato — Allegro molto e con brio SMETANA String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, “From My Life” (29 minutes) Allegro vivo appassionato Allegro moderato a la Polka Largo sostenuto Vivace — Meno presto — Moderato

— INTERMISSION — BRAHMS Quintet in F minor for Piano and String Quartet, Op. 34 (45 minutes) Allegro non troppo Andante, un poco adagio Scherzo: Allegro Finale: Poco sostenuto — Allegro non troppo — Presto, non troppo

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BRUCKNER 7 Symphony No. 7 in E major (1881-1883) ANTON BRUCKNER (1824-1896)

Arranged (1921) for Two Violins, Viola, Cello, Bass, Clarinet, Horn, Piano Four-Hands and Harmonium by Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), Erwin Stein (1885-1958) and Karl Rankl (1898-1968)

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n November 1918, immediately after the cessation of hostilities that had wracked Europe for more than four years, Arnold Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen) in order to “give artists and art-lovers a real and accurate knowledge of modern music,” according to a prospectus describing the new organization written by Schoenberg’s disciple and pupil Alban Berg.

Berg went on to note the Society’s specific objectives: “1) clear, well-prepared performances; 2) frequent repetitions of works; and 3) performances withdrawn from the corrupting influence of publicity; that is, they must not be inspired by the spirit of competition [i.e., pandering to debased tastes to win prizes and easy approval], and must be free from both applause and expressions of disapproval.”

Schoenberg, who assumed dictatorial rule of the Society, defined its activities and policies precisely: there would be one concert every week; repertory would not be announced in advance; admission would be by membership only (there were four categories, from a nominal fee to whatever amount the subscriber wished to pay); music of more than modest dimensions would be newly arranged for piano duet or chamber ensemble; members of the press could attend but must agree not to review the performances. (It is little wonder that some dubbed the organization the “Viennese Schoenberg-Society,” though Schoenberg waited for a year-and-a-half before presenting any of his own compositions.) The financial prospects for the Society were not promising, 10

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especially in view of the general economic strictures in post-war Austria, but 320 memberships were subscribed and some of Vienna’s best young musicians — Rudolf Serkin, Eduard Steuermann, Erwin Stein, Ernst Bachrich, Rudolf Kolisch, Josef Rufer, Egon Wellesz, Paul Pisk, Josef Hauer — agreed to perform and help with the organizational work; Anton Webern was Schoenberg’s chief factotum.

Between December 1918 and the end of 1921, the Society gave well over 100 concerts at which were heard nearly 200 different pieces by Reger, Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, Casella, Delius, Dukas, Satie, Schmidt, Schreker, Ravel, Scriabin, Korngold, Milhaud, Pfitzner, Toch, Charpentier, Janáček, Pijper and many others now less well remembered. In addition to its regular concerts, the organization also produced a number of special events to aid its work: four “Propaganda Evenings” of announced repertory open to guests; a program devoted entirely to music of Ravel; several performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, from which grew a greatly successful tour that introduced that extraordinary work around Europe; two “Classical Concerts” of compositions by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms; and a fund-raising “Evening of Waltzes” with music by the Strauss family.

Among the last projects undertaken by the Verein was an ambitious arrangement of Bruckner’s monumental Symphony No. 7 by Schoenberg’s students Hanns Eisler (movements I and III), Erwin Stein (II) and Karl Rankl (IV). They finished their work a week after the Society folded, however, and it was not heard until March 2000, when a mixed ensemble led by violinist Thomas Christian gave its much-belated premiere in Vienna.

The opening movement of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony is on the grand, architectural scale that characterizes the greatest of his works. Its three themes occupy broad paragraphs that give the music a transcendent spaciousness unmatched by the creations of any other composer. Bruckner

JUL liked to tell the story that the first theme came to him in a dream, which he considered a good omen. Kapellmeister Dorm, an old friend from Linz, he would say, appeared to him while he slept, whistled this tune, and prophesied, “With this theme, you will make your fortune.”

Bruckner immediately hopped out of bed, lit a candle, and wrote down the precious melody. The nocturnal inspiration proved effective because Dorm’s words came true as this work carried Bruckner’s name across the musical world. The long opening theme is succeeded by a more lyrical motive with a turn figure (a favorite melodic device of Wagner).

After one of Bruckner’s characteristic ringing climaxes, the movement’s third theme appears, a quiet but somewhat heavy peasant dance presented in near-unison. The development section begins with an inversion of the opening theme, after which the various melodies of the exposition are again assayed. The recapitulation commences quietly and without preparation, and includes the earlier themes in heightened settings. The coda is based on the first motive and rises to a stentorian close.

The Adagio, Bruckner’s moving memorial tribute to his idol, Richard Wagner, consists of two large stanzas of music that alternate to form a five-part musical structure: A–B–A– B–A. The “A” section is dominated by a solemn chorale. The contrasting music is brighter in mood, with a hint of the lilting Austrian country dance, the Ländler. The tension is controlled through the long span of this movement with consummate mastery by pacing each return of the chorale theme so that it is more magnificent than the preceding presentation.

The third movement is one of Bruckner’s great, whirling Scherzos. A powerful, ostinatolike rhythm supports the open-interval theme.

The movement’s motives are combined and developed with an irresistible urgency as the Scherzo unfolds. The central trio is slower in tempo, sweeter in mood, and lyrical in style.

The finale is based on two thematic elements: a heavily dotted motive and a hymnal theme over a wide-ranging pizzicato bass line. The movement follows a broad sonata outline, with some climaxes based on the dotted-rhythm melody. To round out the Symphony’s structure, the opening theme of the first movement is superimposed on the closing pages of the finale.

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DONOVAN PAVILION

MUSICIANS FROM THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

Hannah Choi, violin Quan Ge, violin Rémi Pelletier, viola Eileen Moon, cello Timothy Cobb, bass Pascual Martínez Forteza, clarinet Philip Myers, horn

Anne-Marie McDermott, piano BRUCKNER Symphony No. 7 in E major (65 minutes) Allegro moderato Adagio: Sehr feierlich und langsam Scherzo: Sehr schnell — Trio: Etwas langsamer — Scherzo Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell Arranged for Two Violins, Viola, Cello, Bass, Clarinet, Horn, Piano Four-Hands and Harmonium by Hanns Eisler, Erwin Stein and Karl Rankl This evening’s concert is performed without intermission.

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CLASSICALLY UNCORKED SERIES PRESENTED BY GRGICH HILLS ESTATE

A TASTE OF NEW MUSIC

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HIS SEASON, BRAVO! VAIL PULLS OUT ALL THE STOPS WITH Classically Uncorked, showcasing the remarkable depth and scope of new music written by living composers from around the world in innovative and entertaining programs. The setting is the stunning Donovan Pavilion, with its arched beam ceilings and towering windows framing spectacular mountain valley views. Seating is cabaret style, with the performers in close proximity to the audience. Add gourmet hors d’oeuvres and handcrafted wines from Grgich Hills Estate and you’ve got all the ingredients for an unforgettable chamber music experience.

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NEW MUSIC FROM PUERTO RICO & BRAZIL Z Sonata for Piano Quartet (2015) CLARICE ASSAD (B. 1978)

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larice Assad, daughter of renowned guitarist Sérgio Assad, has performed professionally since the age of seven. She studied piano, jazz and traditional Brazilian styles, and continued her education at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, Roosevelt University in Chicago and University of Michigan. Among Assad’s honors are the Aaron Copland Award, several ASCAP awards, Meet the Composer’s Van Lier Fellowship, McKnight Visiting Composer Fellowship, and a 2009 Latin Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Composition.

The Z Sonata was composed in 2015 with the generous support of Denise and Jim Anderton for the Opus One piano quartet.

“This is a four-movement work,” wrote Assad, “inspired by the pulp fiction character Zorro, created by Johnston McCully in 1919. Don Diego de La Vega, the man behind the mask, was a California nobleman of Spanish descent.

Preoccupied with social inequalities, he felt torn between the harsh differences between the rich and the poor, and eventually became ‘Zorro,’ hero of the people.

“The piece begins by exploring duality of Don Diego de La Vega, whose lavish lifestyle as a nobleman clashes with his obsessive thoughts about helping others. The second (Pasodoble) and third movements revolve around his love interest, Lolita Pulido, whom he meets during a dance at a costume party dressed as Zorro.

A beautiful lady of noble descent, Lolita is immediately taken by Zorro’s mysteriousness and charming personality, falling in love with the character rather with than the man himself. This reaction helps Diego de La Vega to fully embrace his new identity. The finale (La Mascara del Zorro) explores Zorro’s adventures in his fully formed persona.”

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Fuego de Ángel (“Angel Fire”) for Piano Quartet (2011) ROBERTO SIERRA (B. 1953)

Roberto Sierra, born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico in 1953, graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, attended the Royal College of Music and the University of London, and pursued further study at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. He was also a pupil of György Ligeti at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg. Sierra returned to Puerto Rico in 1982, serving first as Director of the Cultural Activities Program at the University of Puerto Rico and later as Chancellor of the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music. In 1992, he joined the composition faculty of Cornell University.

“The inspiration for Fuego de Ángel,” wrote Sierra, “was a place (Angel Fire, New Mexico) that, although I had never visited, triggered my imagination. The idea of an angel in conjunction with fire reminded me of images from Renaissance and early Baroque religious paintings, in particular some of the Latin American early colonial works which, in fantastic and unusual ways, depict celestial battles between good and evil — such as the many representations of the archangel Michael defeating the devil.” The work encompasses four evocative movements: The Angel and the Shadows; Mysterious Dance; The Vision of the Angel; and Fire.

Travel Diary for Two Percussionists (2007) PAUL LANSKY (B. 1944)

For biographical information on Paul Lansky, please see the program note on page 17 Lansky wrote, “Travel Diary was commissioned by the Meehan/Perkins Duo

AUG in 2007. The piece was composed to be a meditation on travel. While not literally programmatic, the movements reflect the sense of the titles. Leaving Home surveys the percussion ensemble, looking around to see what we’ve packed for the trip. In Cruising Speed, we are on our way. Lost in Philly was inspired by a minor disaster I once had after packing my wife and two small children in the car for a trip from Princeton to Los Angeles and promptly taking a wrong turn, leaving us searching for a way to get past Philadelphia.

Arrived, Phone Home has some references to such old signaling devices as horn calls and Morse code, and ends with a spirited feeling of relief to have finally arrived.”

Once Removed for Two Marimbas (2003) JOHN FITZ ROGERS (B. 1963)

John Fitz Rogers was born in rural Wisconsin in 1963, studied classical and jazz piano as a youngster, and began composing at age twelve. He completed his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his advanced degrees at Yale and Oberlin. Rogers has served on the faculties of Cornell University and the Longy School of Music in Boston, and is currently Professor of Composition at the University of South Carolina School of Music. He has received fellowships and awards from, among others, ASCAP, American Composers Forum, American Music Center and Massachusetts Cultural Council.

American pianist Phillip Bush, Rogers’ faculty colleague at the University of South Carolina, wrote about Once Removed (2003): “With Once Removed, the timbre of two marimbas, the repetition of a simple harmonic cycle at the beginning, and the adherence to a basic pulse all put the listener in mind of Steve Reich’s music, at least initially. But once Rogers has tipped his cap to the minimalist master, the piece takes a very different direction.

By the third minute, the sunny opening has begun to take a darker turn, and from then on we feel a greater unpredictability in the harmonic direction of the piece. There’s a kind of a ‘funhouse mirror’ aspect in the way the piece’s pure untroubled opening meets its reverse image about halfway through, with the intervallic gestures inverted, the harmonies more anxious, and the range lower and darker.”

02 TUESDAY AUGUST 2, 7:30PM C L A S S I C A L LY U N CO R K E D

DONOVAN PAVILION

OPUS ONE

Ida Kavafian, violin Steven Tenenbom, viola Peter Wiley, cello Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

MEEHAN/PERKINS PERCUSSION DUO Todd Meehan, percussion Doug Perkins, percussion C. ASSAD Z Sonata for Piano Quartet (12 minutes) Don Diego de La Vega Pasodoble Lolita Polido La Mascara del Zorro Commissioned by Denise and James Anderton for the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival 2016

SIERRA Fuego de Ángel for Piano Quartet (16 minutes) El ángel y las sombras. Moderado, pero muy expresivo Misteriosa danza. Danzante La visión del angel. Expresivo Fuego

— INTERMISSION — LANSKY Travel Diary for Two Percussionists (20 minutes) Leaving Home Cruising Speed Lost in Philly Arrived, Phone Home ROGERS Once Removed for Two Marimbas (9 minutes)

This evening’s hors d’oeuvres provided by:

CLASSICALLY UNCORKED PRESENTED BY GRGICH HILLS ESTATE

AMERICAN SOUNDSCAPES Mariel for Cello and Marimba (1999) OSVALDO GOLIJOV (B. 1960)

O

svaldo Golijov’s parents, a piano teacher mother and a physician father, emigrated from Russia to Argentina, where Osvaldo was born in 1960 in La Playa, thirty miles from Buenos Aires. He studied piano and composition at the local conservatory before moving in 1983 to Jerusalem, where he entered the Rubin Academy and immersed himself in the colliding musical traditions of that city. Golijov came to the United States in 1986 to do his doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent summers at Tanglewood studying with Lukas Foss and Oliver Knussen. He has been on the faculty of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts since 1991. Golijov’s works, with their syntheses of European, American and Latin secular cultures and their deep spirituality drawn from both Judaism and Christianity, have brought him international notoriety and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award and a coveted MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award.” He was named Musical America’s “2005 Composer of the Year,” and in 2006, Lincoln Center in New York presented a festival called “The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov.”

He is currently working on a commission for the Metropolitan Opera.

“I wrote Mariel in 1999,” Golijov recalled, “when I learned of the death of my friend Mariel Stubrin, who died in an accident while driving in the south of Chile, a landscape similar to that of northern California. I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a single moment frozen forever in one’s memory and which reverberates through the piece, among the waves and echoes of the Brazilian music that Mariel loved.”

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2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

King of the Sun for Piano Quartet (1988) STEPHEN HARTKE (B. 1952)

Stephen Hartke grew up in New York City, where he was a professional choirboy performing with the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera and other musical organizations. Hartke did his undergraduate study in composition at Yale, and earned a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate from the University of California at Santa Barbara. As the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, he taught at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in 1984-1985. He has also served on the faculties of the College of Creative Studies at UC/Santa Barbara and, from 1987 to 2015, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he was Distinguished Professor of Theory and Composition. In July 2015 he became Professor of Composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Hartke has received awards, grants and commissions from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards and National Endowment for the Arts. In 2004, he was awarded the Charles Ives Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His Meanwhile: Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays won the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Hartke wrote of King of the Sun, “Of the five-and-one-half movements that comprise my piano quartet, The King of the Sun, it was the second (Dutch interior) that was composed last, and thus, because it was written with the benefit of hindsight regarding the rest of the work, is in some ways the key to the whole….

The movement title, as is the case with all the

AUG other movements, is taken from a painting

by Joan Miró (1893-1983). The remaining movements deal with other issues, among them the recurrent ‘snail music’ heard first at the very beginning of the work and in several other movements thereafter. But, curiously for a piece entitled The King of the Sun, most of the movements take place indoors or at night, except for the fateful solar encounter of the hapless desert flower. Just as Miró’s paintings are both whimsical and serious, I have sought to accomplish the same thing in my music.”

Textures for Two Pianists and Two Percussionists (2012-2013) PAUL LANSKY (B. 1944)

Paul Lansky was one of this country’s pioneers in the theory and composition of tape and electronic music for forty years (he quipped that he was “trying to make dumb computers sing”) until he refocused his creativity onto more traditional acoustic media in the 1990s. Lansky was born in New York in 1944, attended the city’s High School of Music and Art, and took his professional training at Queens College and Princeton. He taught at Mannes College and Swarthmore College before joining the Princeton faculty in 1969; his distinguished tenure there continued until his retirement in 2014. Lansky has received awards from the League of Composers-ISCM, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts and ASCAP. Lansky wrote “Textures was composed for the unusual combination of two pianists and two percussionists, which was first used

by Bartók in his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The scoring brings the instruments to the edge of their sonic potentials. Pianos can function as percussion instruments and percussion can explore its tuneful side, particularly through mallet instruments. The idea of ‘textures’ occurred to me almost as soon as I started work on the piece. I didn’t decide first on a specific texture and then compose with that in mind. Rather, I jumped in, arms flailing, and then found the focus for a movement once its texture and musical ecology became clear. Basically, the piece celebrates the unique sonic potential of this unusual combination.”

03 WEDNESDAY AUGUST 3, 7:30PM C L A S S I C A L LY U N CO R K E D

DONOVAN PAVILION

OPUS ONE

Ida Kavafian, violin Steven Tenenbom, viola Peter Wiley, cello Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

MEEHAN/PERKINS PERCUSSION DUO Todd Meehan, percussion Doug Perkins, percussion Christopher O’Riley, piano GOLIJOV Mariel for Cello and Marimba (14 minutes) HARTKE King of the Sun for Piano Quartet (14 minutes) Personages in the night guided by the phosphorescent tracks of snails Dutch interior Dancer listening to the organ in a Gothic cathedral Interlude The flames of the sun make the desert flower hysterical Personages and birds rejoicing at the arrival of night — INTERMISSION — LANSKY Textures for Two Pianists and Two Percussionists (30 minutes) Striations Loose Ends Soft Substrates Slither Granite Points of Light Aflutter, On Edge Round-Wound

This evening’s hors d’oeuvres provided by:

CLASSICALLY UNCORKED PRESENTED BY GRGICH HILLS ESTATE

TANGO & A WORLD PREMIERE Hallelujah Junction for Two Pianos (1998) JOHN ADAMS (B. 1947)

J

ohn Adams today enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career: a recent survey conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he received the University of Louisville’s distinguished Grawemeyer Award in 1995; in 1997, he was the focus of the New York Philharmonic’s Composer Week, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America; he has been made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and was also recognized by New York’s Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work titled “John Adams: An American Master,” the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted at Lincoln Center; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize, which includes residencies and teaching at Northwestern University; he was a 2009 recipient of the NEA Opera Award; and he has been granted honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music (London), Juilliard School and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities.

Adams composed Hallelujah Junction in 1998 for premiere by Gloria Cheng and Grant Gershon at the recently opened Getty Center in Los Angeles. “Hallelujah Junction,” 18

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

he explained, “is a tiny truck stop on Route 49 on the Nevada-California border, not far from where I have a small mountain cabin. One can only speculate on its beginnings in the era of prospectors and Gold Rush speculators (although a recent visit revealed that cappuccino is now available there). Here we have a case of a great title looking for a piece.

And now the piece exists: the ‘junction’ being the interlocking style of two-piano writing which features short, highly rhythmicized motives bouncing back and forth between the two pianos in tightly phased sequences.”

Libertango for Two Pianos (1974) ASTOR PIAZZOLL A (1921-1992)

The greatest master of the modern tango was Astor Piazzolla, born in Mar Del Plata, Argentina in 1921 and raised in New York City, where he lived with his father from 1924 to 1937. Before Astor was ten years old, his musical talents had been discovered by Carlos Gardel, then the most famous of all performers and composers of tangos and a cultural hero in Argentina. At Gardel’s urging, the young Astor returned to Buenos Aires in 1937 and joined the popular tango orchestra of Anibal Troilo as arranger and bandoneón player.

Piazzolla studied classical composition with Alberto Ginastera in Buenos Aires, and in 1954, he wrote a symphony for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic that earned him a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. When Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, he founded his own performing group and began to create a modern style for the tango that combined elements of traditional tango, Argentinean folk music and contemporary classical, jazz and popular techniques into a “Nuevo Tango” that was as suitable for the concert hall as for the dance floor. Piazzolla toured widely, recorded frequently and

AUG composed incessantly until he suffered a stroke in Paris in August 1990. He died in Buenos Aires on July 5, 1992.

In 1974, Piazzolla moved to Rome, claiming that “I’m sure I’m going to write better there than in Buenos Aires.” His European agent, Aldo Pagani, set him up with an apartment near the Piazza Navona, guaranteed him $500 a month for living expenses, and started arranging appearances and recordings, beginning with a program on Italian television with Charles Aznavour on March 25, 1974. When Pagani urged him to compose pieces that were short enough to be easily programmed on the radio, Piazzolla protested, “But Beethoven wrote …”

“Beethoven died deaf and poor,” the agent told his client. “Up to this point, you are neither deaf nor poor.” Piazzolla took Pagani’s point, and wrote a series of short instrumental pieces during the following months, including the hard-driving Libertango, which the composer called “a sort of song of liberty,” a release of new ideas inspired by a new place. Piazzolla included Libertango on his first Italian LP (which he titled Libertango), and the number became a hit in vocal versions recorded by the French singer Guy Marchard and the Jamaican performer Grace Jones.

Piano Quartet POUL RUDERS (B. 1949)

Poul Ruders, Denmark’s preeminent living composer, was born in 1949 in Ringsted and sang as a child in the Copenhagen Boys’ Choir and studied piano and organ at the conservatory in Odense. He began composing as a teenager, but chose to take his professional training at the Royal Danish Conservatory as an organist; other than a few lessons in composition and orchestration, he is self-taught as a composer. Ruders worked for a time as a church organist, but he has devoted his career almost entirely to composition; his only significant teaching commitment has been as a guest professor at Yale University in 1991.

Ruders has received two Grammy nominations and recognition as “Composer of the Year” from the Marché international de l’édition musicale (the world’s largest music industry trade fair) for his opera The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s harrowing novel of a dystopian America ruled by Christian fundamentalists.

04 THURSDAY AUGUST 4, 7:30PM C L A S S I C A L LY U N CO R K E D

DONOVAN PAVILION

OPUS ONE Ida Kavafian, violin Steven Tenenbom, viola Peter Wiley, cello Anne-Marie McDermott, piano Christopher O’Riley, piano ADAMS Hallelujah Junction for Two Pianos (17 minutes) PIAZZOLLA Libertango for Two Pianos (5 minutes) — INTERMISSION — RUDERS Piano Quartet (20 minutes) Co-commissioned by Bravo! Vail Music Festival 2016 and by Patricia Isenberg for the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival 2017

This evening’s hors d’oeuvres provided by:

FREE CONCERT SERIES

CHAMBER MUSIC FOR ALL FREE CONCERTS, ALL SUMMER LONG

T

AKE A PAUSE FROM YOUR day to experience free hourlong chamber music concerts performed by incredible musicians. These concerts include a musical sampling for everyone, and are performed in venues throughout the Vail Valley.

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SCHEDULE AT-A-GLANCE

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Beaver Creek Interfaith

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28 Chapel, 7:30PM.........................22

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Vail Interfaith Chapel,

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05 1:00PM.................................................24

19

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Gypsum Town Hall, 7:30PM................................................. 32 Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM.................................................34

Vail Interfaith Chapel,

28 1:00PM................................................ 48 JUL

Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM................................................ 40

30 Chapel, 7:30PM......................... 52

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21

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Vail Interfaith Chapel,

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Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM.................................................30

26 1:00PM................................................ 44

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29 1:00PM.................................................50

Edwards Interfaith Chapel,

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Golden Eagle Senior

Vail Interfaith Chapel, 1:00PM.................................................38

06 7:30PM.................................................26 07 1:00PM.................................................28

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28 Center, Eagle, 11:00AM... 46

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Brush Creek Pavilion, Eagle, 7:30PM..............................42

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Vail Interfaith Chapel,

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Gallery Row, Beaver Creek,

Beaver Creek Interfaith

Maloit Park, Minturn,

06 2:00PM................................................54

FREE CONCERT

AN EVENING WITH ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT Sonata No. 21 in B-flat major, D. 960 (1828) FR ANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

I

n the hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna on March 26, 1828, immediately after completing his magnificent C major Symphony (justifiably dubbed “The Great” by later generations), Franz Schubert gave the only public concert entirely of his works held during his lifetime. The event, prompted and sponsored by his circle of devoted friends, was a significant artistic and financial success, and he used the proceeds to celebrate the occasion at a local tavern, pay off some old debts, acquire a new piano, and buy tickets for Nicolò Paganini’s sensational debut in Vienna three days later. Despite the renewed enthusiasm for creative work that concert inspired in him, and encouraging signs that his music was beginning to receive recognition outside of Vienna, Schubert’s spirits were dampened during the following months by the perilous state of his health. His constitution, never robust, had been undermined by syphilis, and by the summer of 1828, he was suffering from headaches, exhaustion and frequent digestive distress. In May, he received invitations from friends to summer in both Graz and Gmunden in order to refresh himself with the country air, but he had to refuse his hosts because he lacked money to pay for the transportation. He settled instead for a threeday excursion in early June with the composerconductor Franz Lachner to nearby Baden, where he wrote a Fugue in E minor for organ, four hands (D. 952, his only work for organ), which he tried out with his companion on the instrument in the 12th-century Cistercian abbey at neighboring Heiligenkreuz on June 4th. Between his return to the city a few days later and August, he composed the Mass in 22

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E-flat, made a setting in Hebrew of Psalm 92 for the City Synagogue of Vienna, created a number of short pieces for piano, wrote all but one of the thirteen songs published after his death in the collection Schwanengesang, did extensive work on what proved to be his last three piano sonatas (D. 958-960), and began his C major String Quintet.

At the end of August, Schubert felt unwell, complaining of dizziness and loss of appetite, and his physician advised that he move for a time to a new house outside the city recently acquired by the composer’s brother Ferdinand.

Though Ferdinand’s dwelling was damp and uncomfortable and hardly conducive to his recovery, Franz felt better during the following days, and he was able to participate in an active social life and attend the premiere of a comedy by his friend Eduard von Bauernfeld on September 5th. Schubert also continued to compose incessantly, completing the three piano sonatas on the 26th, and performing them at the house of Dr. Ignaz Menz the following day. The C major Quintet was finished at that same time; it and the sonatas were the last instrumental works that he completed. On October 31st, Schubert fell seriously ill, his syphilitic condition perhaps exacerbated by the typhus then epidemic in Vienna, and he died on November 19, 1828, at the age of 31. He had originally intended that the three sonatas be dedicated to Johann Hummel, a pianist, composer, student of Mozart and important supporter during his last years, but when Diabelli published them in 1838 as “Schubert’s Last Compositions: Three Grand Sonatas,” Hummel was already dead, so the pieces were instead inscribed to another champion of Schubert’s music, Robert Schumann.

“All three of the last sonatas are works in which meditation, charm, wistfulness, sadness

JUN

YOU BELIEVE HAPPINESS TO BE DERIVED FROM THE PLACE IN WHICH ONCE YOU HAVE BEEN HAPPY, BUT IN TRUTH IT IS CENTERED IN OURSELVES." FRANZ SCHUBERT

and joy are housed in noble structures,” wrote George R. Marek. Though each follows the traditional four-movement Classical pattern of opening sonata-allegro, lyrical slow movement, scherzo (minuet in the C minor Sonata) and lively finale, this is music less concerned with the titanic, visionary, long-range formal structures of Beethoven (whom Schubert idolized) than with the immediately perceived qualities of melody, harmonic color, piano sonority and the subtle balancing of keys — what Hans Költzsch in his study of Schubert’s sonatas called “the nascent present.” This characteristically Schubertian predilection is particularly evident in the development sections of the opening movements, which eschew the rigorous thematic working-out of the Beethovenian model in favor of a warm, even sometimes dreamy, lyricism whose principal aims are to examine fragments of the movement’s melodies in different harmonic lights and to extract the instrument’s most ingratiating sonorities. The B-flat Sonata, generally regarded as Schubert’s greatest achievement in the genre, opens with a movement of breadth and majesty based on one his most ravishing melodies. The Andante, music such as it is given to only the greatest masters to compose, seems almost freed from earthly bonds, rapt out of time. “It is,” concluded Alfred Einstein, “the climax and apotheosis of Schubert’s instrumental lyricism and his simplicity of form.” The playful Scherzo that follows serves as the perfect foil to the slow movement. The finale balances a certain seriousness of expression with exuberance and rhythmic energy.

28 TUESDAY JUNE 28, 7:30PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

BEAVER CREEK INTERFAITH CHAPEL Anne-Marie McDermott, piano SCHUBERT Sonata No. 21 in B-flat major, D. 960 Molto moderato Andante sostenuto Scherzo: Allegro vivace con delicatezza Allegro, ma non troppo

ANNE-MARIE MCDERMOTT

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FREE CONCERT

MOZART & SCHUMANN Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546 (1783; arranged for strings in 1788) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

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n 1782, one year after he had bolted from Salzburg to take up life as a free-lance composer and pianist in Vienna, Mozart developed a new, gleaming admiration for the music of Bach, Handel and other masters of the early 18th century. He had been exposed to the works of such Italian Baroque composers as Leo, Caldara, Durante and Alessandro Scarlatti in Salzburg, where their scores were used for performance and for study, but his interest in Bach grew from his association in Vienna with Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the Court Librarian and musical amateur who had developed a taste for the contrapuntal glories of German music while serving as ambassador to the Prussian court at Berlin. Van Swieten, who is also remembered as the librettist for Haydn’s oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, produced a weekly series of concerts in Vienna devoted to “ancient music,” and hired the best available musicians, including Mozart, to perform and arrange the compositions for these events.

(Among other projects for van Swieten, Mozart scored Handel’s Messiah for classical orchestra.) Mozart, perhaps history’s greatest adept at absorbing musical styles, learned much about the fine workings of Baroque counterpoint from his close involvement with the works of Bach and Handel.

Among the immediate musical results of Mozart’s interest in Bach’s imitative procedures were the C minor Mass (K. 427), a suite for piano (K. 399), the A minor Sonata for violin and piano (K. 402) and several sketches for keyboard fugues; none of these works was completed. The climax of this development in Mozart’s style was reached with the powerful Fugue for Two Pianos in C minor, K. 426, written in December 1783. Mozart may have 24

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modeled his subject for this densely packed fugue on the motive Handel employed for the chorus And with his stripes we are healed from Messiah or perhaps on one that Haydn used in the fugal finale of his F minor Quartet, Op. 20, No. 5 of 1772. Mozart utilized it once again for the Kyrie of his Requiem. In 1788 he returned to his keyboard fugue, scoring it for strings and prefacing it with an austere Adagio in the style of the French overture (K. 546).

String Quartet No. 3 in A major, Op. 41, No. 3 (1842) ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Schumann first considered writing a string quartet as early as 1838 — “The thought gives me pleasure,” he told his future wife, the superb pianist Clara Wieck. He made two attempts the following year (“I can assure you they’re as good as Haydn” was his hyperbolic description of his sketches to his fiancée), but he was dissatisfied with them, and apparently destroyed the manuscripts. Invitations to perform in Bremen and Hamburg, cities eager to hear Clara’s piano playing and Robert’s new B-flat Symphony, enabled them to tour together in February 1842 (at no little emotional expense, however, since it meant being separated for some time from their first child, Marie, born the previous September 1st), but rather than traveling with her to Copenhagen, Robert went home to Leipzig, immersing himself in the study of the quartets of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven in April and May. On June 4th, he began the furious activity that yielded up his only three string quartets. As a surprise for Clara’s 23rd birthday, Schumann arranged a private performance of all three quartets on September 13th at the home of Ferdinand David, the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s concertmaster, for whom Felix Mendelssohn was to write his Violin Concerto two years later.

Schumann’s Third Quartet, according to James Lyons, “is in form the least traditional

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05 TUESDAY JULY 5, 1:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

© CHRISTIAN STEINER

of this grouping, in temperament the most individual, in invention the most resourceful, and in construction the most masterly.” The Quartet opens with a tiny introduction, hardly more than a preludial sigh, encompassing the falling-fifth interval that serves as the motivic germ from which the main theme and much of the first movement grow. The lyrical subsidiary theme is buoyed by an animated, off-beat accompaniment. Since the development section is almost entirely occupied with the falling motive of the principal theme, the recapitulation begins with the songful second subject; the ghost of the first theme hovers above the coda. The Assai agitato, which functions as the Quartet’s scherzo, is a most unusual formal construction — a set of free variations on a theme that is not played in its original shape until half-way through the movement. The attenuated opening variation on the as-yet-unheard melody is dreamy and evanescent; the next is a bounding 6/8 hunting galop, while the third is given in densely packed imitation. After these three variations, the movement’s theme is finally presented by first violin and viola in canon. A final heroic variation and a quiet postlude round out the movement.

The Adagio, one of Schumann’s most touching outpourings of yearning Romantic emotion, is a rhapsodic treatment of several fine melodic ideas. The finale, wrote Melvin Berger, is “the apotheosis of rondo form, with each of thirteen individual sections clearly separated and delineated.” The music has an impetuous quality that nicely balances the introspection of the previous movement to draw this product of Schumann’s early maturity to a close in a mood of triumphant optimism.

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL

AEOLUS QUARTET Nicholas Tavani, violin Rachel Shapiro, violin Gregory Luce, viola Alan Richardson, cello MOZART Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546 SCHUMANN String Quartet No. 3 in A major, Op. 41, No. 3 Andante espressivo — Allegro molto moderato Assai agitato — Un poco Adagio — Tempo risoluto Adagio molto Finale: Allegro molto vivace

AEOLUS QUARTET

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FREE CONCERT

AEOLUS PLAYS BARBER Quartet for Queen Mab (2014) MISSY MAZZOLI (B. 1980)

M

issy Mazzoli is a gifted artist of wide-ranging talents whose works, according to her publisher, the distinguished New York firm of G. Schirmer, “reflect a trend among composers of her generation to combine styles, writing music for the omnivorous audiences of the 21st century.” Mazzoli was born in 1980 in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington and studied at Boston University, Yale University School of Music and Royal Conservatory of the Hague.

She taught composition at Yale in 2006 before serving for the next three years as Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of young composers.

Mazzoli composed Quartet for Queen Mab in 2014 on a commission from the modernmusic string quartet ETHEL and the Miller Theater of Columbia University, where the work was premiered on February 5, 2015. The composer wrote, “Queen Mab is an elusive creature from folklore and literature [her bestknown reference is in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet], a tiny fairy who drives her chariot into the noses of sleeping people. She enters their brains, eliciting dreams of their heart’s desire. This quartet embraces the wildness of Queen Mab’s journey and the dreams that result; Baroque ornaments twist around long legato lines and melodies ricochet between players. The music follows a sort of intuitive dream logic but returns again and again to the opening material, resulting in a sort of insistent, insane ritornello [i.e., returning passage].”

Washed by Fire (2007) KEERIL MAKAN (B. 1972)

Keeril Makan was born in Livingston, New Jersey in 1972 and raised there by parents of South African Indian and Russian Jewish 26

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descent. After training as a violinist, Makan received degrees in composition and religion from Oberlin College and completed his doctorate in composition at the University of California at Berkeley; he also studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki on a Fulbright grant and in France on a George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California. He is now Associate Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Makan wrote that Washed by Fire, composed in 2007 on a commission from LEVYdance of San Francisco, was “collaboratively conceived with choreographer Benjamin Levy and inspired by the desire to explore issues of cultural and personal identity. We attempted to explore parallels in our family histories based upon flight from repressive governments and cultures. Levy’s parents are Persian Jews who escaped Iran during the Islamic Revolution in the 1970s. My father is Indian but was raised in South Africa, from which he emigrated in the late 1960s to escape Apartheid. My maternal grandfather was a Jew who escaped Russia during the Russian Revolution. This proved to be an impossibly difficult conceptual starting point, which we had to circumvent in order to begin creating. We proposed creating materials, both musical and gestural, which we were attracted to in some instinctual way, but would ordinarily be ashamed of because of their simplicity and wouldn’t want other people to hear or see. I took this idea to heart.

By embracing musical references that my mind often avoids, I was able to reconnect with rhythm, melody and mode in a way that is markedly different from my other recent music.

I created a piece that resonated with me on a fundamental level, one in which my emotions are not filtered by abstraction, where the focus is on a visceral connection with time. The piece attempts to be honest about the difficulty of understanding how identity is constructed, but at the same time acknowledges that connections to a cultural and familial past shape means of expression.”

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06 String Quartet, Op. 11 (1936)

© MICHAEL DEVITO

SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981)

During the spring of 1936, shortly after completing his First Symphony, Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, his frequent companion of those years (the Menotti family compound on the Italian side of Lake Lugano was perhaps Barber’s favorite place in all of Europe), wandered through Switzerland and Austria, settling for the summer and early autumn in a little lodge rented from the local game warden at St. Wolfgang, just east of Salzburg. In that idyllic spot, at the foot of a mountain, with a stream trickling along the side of the house, Barber composed the chorus Let Down the Bars, O Death, the song I Hear an Army and his only String Quartet. By early November, he was back in Rome to prepare for the premieres of the First Symphony and the Quartet the following month. The concerts were a success, and the arrangement for string orchestra that he made of the slow movement from the Quartet — the Adagio for Strings — soon came to be recognized as one of the masterworks of the 20th century.

Barber’s String Quartet follows an unusual formal progression. The composer considered the work to be in just two movements: a large, fully worked-out sonata form, followed by the Adagio and an abbreviated recall of the opening movement. This structure places the Adagio, with its plaintive melody, rich modalism, austere texture and mood of reflective introspection, at both the formal and expressive center of the Quartet, and it is the music that remains most present in the mind when the work is through. The opening movement, in B minor, provides an effective foil to the Adagio. Its first theme, given at the outset in unison, is energetic and rather deliberately modern in its aggressive harmony.

Barber’s innate lyricism is manifested, however, in the contrasting second and third themes: one, presented in chordal fashion, is delicately modal in its harmony; the other is a simple, wide-ranging melody initiated by the first violin above an almost static accompaniment.

These three themes are developed and then recapitulated to round out the movement.

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AEOLUS QUARTET

Nicholas Tavani, violin Rachel Shapiro, violin Gregory Luce, viola Alan Richardson, cello

MAZZOLI Quartet for Queen Mab MAKAN Washed by Fire BARBER String Quartet, Op. 11 Molto allegro e appassionato Molto adagio — Molto allegro (come prima)

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SCHUBERT’S CELLO QUINTET Quintet for Two Violins, Viola and Two Cellos in C major, Op. 163 (D. 956) (1828) FR ANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

For further biographical background on this work, please see the program note on page 22

T

he C major Quintet was finished in early September 1828; it and the three piano sonatas were the last instrumental works Schubert completed. On October 2nd, he offered them to the publisher Heinrich Albert Probst of Leipzig: “I have composed, among other things, three Sonatas for pianoforte solo, which I should like to dedicate to Hummel.

Moreover, I have several sets of songs by Heine of Hamburg, which pleased extraordinarily here, and I have finally turned out a Quintet for two violins, viola and two violoncellos. The Sonatas I have played with much success in several places, but the Quintet will be tried out only during the coming days. If perchance any of these compositions would suit you, let me know.” Probst refused the lot. On October 31, 1828, Schubert fell seriously ill, his syphilitic condition perhaps exacerbated by the typhus then epidemic in Vienna, and he died on November 19, 1828, at the age of 31. The Quintet apparently did not receive the performance Schubert mentioned; it was heard for the first time only when an ensemble headed by Joseph Hellmesberger, son of a classmate and fellow chorister of Schubert, played it in Vienna’s Musikverein Hall on November 7, 1850. The work was published only in 1853.

Schubert’s C major Quintet occupies the most exalted level in the entire realm of chamber music. In his survey of the ensemble repertory, Homer Ulrich wrote, “In nobility of conception, beauty of melody and variety of mood, it is without equal.” William Mann called it “[Schubert’s] masterpiece, and perhaps the 28

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greatest of all his works in range of emotion, quality of material and formal perfection.” The pianist Arthur Rubinstein asked that the slow movement be played at his funeral. Much of the success of the Quintet arises from the rich sonorities created by the use of a second cello rather than, as Mozart and Beethoven had done, a second viola to complete the scoring.

Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) had composed some 125 works with a similar instrumentation, but in his study of Schubert, Alfred Einstein cited the quintets of the French composer George Onslow (1784-1853), with which Schubert was familiar, as the more immediate influence. “With only five voices — Schubert uses a second cello that is treated differently from the first — he expressed a whole musical universe,” wrote Joseph Wechsberg. “A very great work.”

The opening of the first movement, according to J.A. Westrup, “is remarkable not for its melodic interest but for the expectancy it creates.” The work’s first theme comprises a simple, unadorned tonic chord that swells and changes harmonic color, and a melodic extension in the first violin. This sequence is repeated with changed voicing and effect before the music gains mightily in intensity to lead to three double-stopped chords and a single-note modulation into the second theme, a cello duet melody that is among the greatest lyrical inspirations in all of instrumental music.

The melody proves irresistible to the violins, who take it over in tandem. A group of closing motives and another hint of the second theme complete the exposition. The development section, largely based on one of the closing motives, is expansive and masterful, evoking an almost Beethovenian intensity of mood supported by a magnificent formal logic. The recapitulation is altered in details of scoring and texture from the exposition, but retains its glowing colors, incomparable lyricism and breadth of expression through the final measures.

The Adagio is music of such beauty and

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© CHRISTIAN STEINER

07 introspection as to be almost rapt out of time.

It opens with a gesture that is as much thought as theme, an ethereal stillness created by longheld notes in the inner voices, subtle pizzicati in the second cello, and tiny motivic flickers from the first violin. This sort of nearly motionless music cannot, however, sustain the formal requirements of a slow movement in a piece the size of this Quintet, so Schubert provided an extended middle section which offers a strong contrast to the surrounding music in the intensity of its feeling and the stern animation of its rhythmic motion. Emotion spent, the music quiets again, sighs, and returns to the opening theme, decorated this time with delicate filigree from the second cello and first violin. As the movement glides towards its end, it is overcome once again by the hushed tranquility of its beginning.

The vivacious, open-air Scherzo provides a magnificent foil to the preceding movement.

The main theme, a scintillating combination of leaping village dance and hunting-horn call that requires considerable individual and ensemble virtuosity from the players, launches the miniature sonata form that makes up the first section of the movement. The central trio occupies a completely different emotional world, one of shadows and uncertainty — its harmonies are tinged with tragedy; its rhythmic motion, nearly exhausted; its melodies, hardly able to summon more than the smallest intervals. As quickly as they came, however, the dark thoughts of the trio are put to flight by the return (or, perhaps better, the revival) of the Scherzo to round out the movement.

The deeper emotions of the two preceding movements are banished by the bursting high spirits of the finale. A rousing theme of Gypsy inflection opens the movement, and eventually gives way to a more lyrical melody for first violin and first cello enlivened with sparkling triplet figurations. A third melodic idea, a cousin to the flowing second theme of the opening movement, is announced by the paired cellos. All three themes are traversed again in heightened settings before a bounding coda in faster tempo closes this magnificent masterwork of Franz Schubert’s fullest genius.

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Nicholas Tavani, violin Rachel Shapiro, violin Gregory Luce, viola Alan Richardson, cello

Yumi Kendall, cello SCHUBERT Quintet for Two Violins, Viola and Two Cellos in C major, Op. 163 (D. 956) Allegro ma non troppo Adagio Scherzo: Presto — Trio: Andante sostenuto — Scherzo Allegretto

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BEETHOVEN & HAYDN Sonata in C major, Hoboken XVI:48 (1789) JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)

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n February 1789, the Leipzig music publishing house of Johann and Christoph Breitkopf announced a subscription for “six Clavier Sonatas by the beloved Kapellmeister Joseph Haydn.” Haydn, growing frustrated with the “sleepy” (his word) firm of Artaria in Vienna, was favoring Breitkopf with more of his works at that time, and he promptly sent the first number of the projected set, the remarkable C major Sonata (H. XVI:48), in April. Subscriptions, however, were apparently insufficient for Breitkopf to risk completing the venture, and the C major Sonata was published as an independent item in a Musikalisches Pot-Pourri.

The two-movement C major Sonata, in content and form, is almost Beethovenian in character, and late Beethoven at that. Its opening movement, three times as long as the finale, is a deeply felt essay in broad tempo whose chromaticism, minor-mode episodes, elaborate embellishments and strongly expressive nature were influenced by the proto-Romanticisms of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian’s Son No. 2. The movement’s unusual form borrows elements of sonata, variations and rondo: the tender main theme recurs twice in the home key, separated by free, minor-mode development-variations on the melody. The closing Rondo, a formal pendant and emotional foil to the preceding music, is dashing, sunbright and untroubled.

Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 31, No. 3 (1802) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

The three Piano Sonatas of Op. 31 Beethoven completed during the summer of 1802 in Heiligenstadt stand at the threshold of a new creative language, the dynamic and dramatic musical speech of his so-called “second 30

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period.” The E-flat major Sonata, Op. 31, No. 3 embodies remarkable strides forward in the sophistication of its form and content. Its very first sound, for example, a smiling chord topped with a blithe descending motive, commits the stylistic heresy of avoiding the work’s nominal tonality, a fundamental structural procedure of Classical music. The home key — E-flat major — is grazed, then toyed with again before the music proceeds to its second theme, an aerial melody displayed above a broken-chord bass figuration. The extraordinary thing about this opening section of the Sonata is the manner in which Beethoven couched his iconoclasms in such suave musical language, making the revolutionary seem elegant, inevitable and even beautiful. The development section deals mainly with permutations of the principal subject. The recapitulation of the earlier themes, appropriately adjusted as to key, closes the movement.

The second movement is labeled Scherzo, though this is not the dynamic, triple-meter dance piece that Beethoven perfected in his symphonies, but rather a duple-meter, sonata-form essay whose upward striding main theme seems to have been joined when it was already in progress. The following movement contrasts two different types of music — the Minuet that forms the outer sections is serene and smoothly flowing, while the central trio jumps about the keyboard in a rather ungainly manner. The finale, another sonata form, is a whirlwind of incessant rhythmic energy modeled on the Italian tarantella and a dazzling showpiece of virtuoso pianism.

Fantasia on an Ostinato (1985) JOHN CORIGLIANO (B. 1938)

John Corigliano, one of today’s most prominent and frequently performed American composers, was born in New York City on February 16, 1938 and raised in a family rich in musical talent — his father, John, Sr., was for many years the concertmaster of

© JIYANG CHEN; © SHAO TING KUEI

JUL the New York Philharmonic and his mother was an accomplished pianist and teacher.

From 1955 to 1960, Corigliano studied at Columbia University with Otto Luening and at the Manhattan School of Music with Vittorio Giannini. He has served as Composer-inResidence with the Chicago Symphony, taught at the Manhattan School of Music and Lehman College of CUNY, and been on the Juilliard faculty since 1991. Corigliano has been recognized with such distinguished honors as the Pulitzer Prize, Grawemeyer Award, two Grammy Awards and an Oscar (for The Red Violin). In 1992, Musical America named him that publication’s first “Composer of the Year.”

Corigliano wrote of his Fantasia on an Ostinato, composed in 1985 as a test piece for the 7th Van Cliburn International Piano competition, “I constructed the work as a giant arch, with the beginning and end precisely notated but with a series of interlocking repeated patterns forming the large central section: the performer decides the number and, to a certain extent, the character of these repetitions. In other words, the shape of the piece is the performer’s to build. These repeated patterns comprise my only experiment in ‘minimalist’ technique.

Interestingly, the duration of the Fantasia varied from seven minutes to over twenty in the Cliburn performances!

“While mulling this piece I remembered some of minimalism’s forebears — Pachelbel’s Canon, Ravel’s Boléro, and the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, in which a relentlessly repeating ostinato figure [the Italian word for ‘obstinate’] continues unvaried (except for a long crescendo and added secondary voices) for nearly five minutes: unusual in Beethoven, who constantly varied his materials.

“The first half of my Fantasia on an Ostinato develops the obsessive rhythm of the Beethoven and the simple harmonies implicit in the first part of his melody. Its second part launches into those interlocking repetitions and reworks the strange major–minor descending chords of the latter part of the Beethoven into a chain of harmonies over which the performer-repeated patterns grow continually more ornate. This climaxes in a return of the original rhythm and, finally, the reappearance of the theme itself.”

12 TUESDAY JULY 12, 1:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL Tomer Gewirtzman, piano Steven Lin, piano HAYDN Sonata in C major, Hoboken XVI:48 Andante con espressione Rondo: Presto BEETHOVEN Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 31, No. 3 Allegro Scherzo: Allegretto vivace Menuetto: Moderato e grazioso Presto con fuoco CORIGLIANO Fantasia on an Ostinato

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STEVEN LIN

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BACH, MENDELSSOHN & COUPERIN Passacaille (“Passacaglia”) in B minor from Pièces de Clavecin, Ordre 8, No. 9 (1717) FR ANÇOIS COUPERIN (1668-1733)

F

rançois Couperin, nicknamed even during his lifetime “le grand” (“The Great”), was the most important member of a family of musicians prominent around Paris from the late 16th century to the mid 19th century: Couperins, including François’ father, Charles, occupied the organ loft of St. Gervais in Paris for 173 years. François, born in Paris in 1668, was appointed organist of St. Gervais in 1683 and ten years later was named one of four organists to the court of Versailles. By the turn of the century, Couperin was appearing regularly as harpsichordist and composer at the court’s musical events, though he was not officially given the title Ordinaire de la Musique de la Chambre du Roi pour le Clavecin until 1717, a year after his pedagogical treatise L’art de toucher le clavecin appeared; it was one of the era’s most important manuals concerning the ornamentation and performance of French keyboard music. At the same time, Couperin published the first of four large volumes of Pièces de clavecin, which contain over 200 separate items, many with fanciful or descriptive titles inspired by friends, feelings or fashions. Couperin also composed several books of chamber music, a considerable amount of Latin sacred vocal music, and a few vernacular songs. His works were famed for being unfailingly elegant and melodious, rich but not excessively chromatic in harmony, clear in design, expressive without being maudlin, and current with the best musical fashions of the day.

The Passacaille in B minor (“Passacaglia,” Ordre 8, No. 9), does not follow the procedure of continuous variations on a ground bass usually associated with the name, but is in the 32

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form of a rondeau, with a recurring refrain framing several short sections of music.

Toccata in E minor, BWV 914 (ca. 1710) JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)

The genre of the toccata in Germany traces its roots to at least the fifteenth century, when the title was used to designate independent keyboard pieces not based on dance types, canti firmi (i.e., borrowed melodies) or vocal models. The term was derived from the Italian word “toccare” — “to touch” — and indicates a style intended to exhibit the player’s virtuosity and manual dexterity. Johann Sebastian Bach’s toccatas — five for organ and seven for harpsichord, as well as others incorporated into multi-movement works — are the most magnificent 18th-century examples of the species. Bach’s independent toccatas are products of his tenure as Organist and Chamber Musician at the court of Weimar between 1708 and 1717. In their virtuosity, melodiousness and rhythmic vitality, these works show the influence of recent Italian music, which he learned by copying, arranging and performing pieces by Vivaldi, Marcello and others. As was typical of the genre, the E minor Toccata, composed around 1710, comprises a number of contrasting sections: an introductory flourish; an Allegro in closely conversational counterpoint; a poignant Adagio that echoes Bach’s masterful improvisational style; and a stern Fugue in three voices.

Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14 (1828-1830) FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)

The Mendelssohn household was one of the most cultured and affluent in early-19thcentury Berlin, and the family’s children were

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Tomer Gewirtzman, piano Steven Lin, piano

Reminiscences on Mozart’s “Don Juan” (1841)

LISZT Reminiscences on Mozart’s “Don Juan”

FR ANZ LISZT (1811-1886)

© JIYANG CHEN; © SHAO TING KUEI

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all provided with every possible enrichment.

The genius of young Felix as a violinist, pianist and composer was evident by the time he was ten, and his siblings also displayed fine talents as musicians, Fanny as a pianist, Rebecca as a singer and younger brother Paul as a cellist. To display this wealth of hereditary ability, Abraham and Leah Mendelssohn turned their suburban mansion into a twicemonthly concert hall featuring the precocious youngsters’ accomplishments. Among the last works that Mendelssohn composed for those family concerts before setting out in 1829 to make his way as a professional musician was an elfin Étude in E minor, completed on January 4, 1828 (according to the date on the manuscript now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York), to display the grace and agility of his own piano technique. Two years later he revised this sparkling piano scherzo, prefaced it with a nocturnal Andante, and published the twopart work in London and Vienna as the Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14.

Among the most highly regarded by Liszt’s contemporaries of his many arrangements, transcriptions and fantasias on operatic themes was the Reminiscences on Mozart’s “Don Juan,” composed during the summer of 1841 on the tiny Rhine island of Nonnenwerth near Coblenz, which Liszt had purchased with the hope of making it into a family retreat.

The Reminiscences, a virtual tone poem for keyboard, is in three large chapters. The first is concerned with the sinister Act II music of the Commendatore, whom Don Giovanni murdered at the beginning of the opera to set the dramatic machinery in motion and who returns from his grave to mete out the rake’s punishment. The second section, the heart of the work, is a set of elaborate variations on the famous duet of Don Giovanni and Zerlina, La ci darem la mano (“There we’ll take each other’s hand”). The Reminiscences ends with a brilliant treatment of Giovanni’s sparkling “Champagne Aria,” Finch’ han dal vino (“Now that the wine has set their heads whirling”), in which he instructs his servant, Leporello, to prepare for the evening’s festivities.

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F. COUPERIN Passacaille in B minor from Pièces de Clavecin, Ordre 8, No. 9 J.S. BACH Toccata in E minor, BWV 914 Moderato — Un poco allegro — Adagio — Fugue: Allegro MENDELSSOHN Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14

TOMER GEWIRTZMAN

STEVEN LIN

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HAYDN, CHOPIN & LISZT Sonata in C major, Hoboken XVI:50 (1794-1795) JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)

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aydn’s final set of three keyboard sonatas (H. XVI:50-52) was written in London in 1794 or 1795 for the gifted pianist Therese Bartolozzi (née Jansen), a native of Aachen, Germany who had settled in London to study with Clementi. She became one of the city’s most sought-after performers and piano teachers, and both Clementi and Dussek dedicated important sonatas to her. Haydn met Therese early in his second London residence, and he became friendly enough with her to serve as a witness at her wedding on May 16, 1795 to Gaetano Bartolozzi, son of the well-known engraver Francesco Bartolozzi. Haydn later also wrote for her three piano trios (H. XV:27-29).

The C major Sonata (H. XVI:50) begins with a splendid movement, a boundlessly inventive fantasia in sonata form grown from a single thematic kernel, which the eminent Haydn authority Jens Peter Larsen called “perhaps the finest expression of the composer’s own creative power. It is a marvelous example of his structural mastery, developing a short and rather formal opening theme into a varied but consistently unified piece.” The Adagio is delicate and graceful, finely shading its sundappled principal tonality with moments of harmonic melancholy. Such a movement speaks eloquently of the influence of Wolfgang Mozart, dead only three years, had on the music of Haydn’s late maturity. The compact finale is a sparkling sonatina-form essay that is almost a scherzo.

Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 (1831-1835) FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)

A “ballad,” according to the Random House Dictionary, is “a simple, narrative poem of 34

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popular origin, composed in short stanzas, especially one of romantic character and adapted for singing.” The term was derived from an ancient musico-poetic form that accompanied dancing (“ballare” in medieval Latin, hence “ball” and “ballet”), which had evolved into an independent vocal genre by the 14th century in the exquisitely refined works of Guillaume de Machaut and other early composers of secular music. The ballad was well established in England as a medium for the recitation of romantic or fantastic stories by at least the year 1500; it is mentioned by Pepys, Milton, Addison and Swift, often disdainfully because of the frequently scurrilous nature of its content. The form, having adopted a more refined demeanor, became popular in Germany during the late 18th century, when it attracted no less a literary luminary than Goethe, whose tragic narrative Erlkönig furnished the text for one of Schubert’s most beloved songs. Chopin seems to have been the first composer to apply the title to a piece of abstract instrumental music, apparently indicating that his four Ballades hint at a dramatic flow of emotions such as could not be appropriately contained by traditional Classical forms. Brahms, Liszt, Fauré, Grieg, Vieuxtemps, Frank Martin and others all later provided instrumental works with the title Ballade.

The first ideas for the Ballade No. 1 (G minor, Op. 23) were sketched in May and June 1831, when Chopin was living anxiously in Vienna, almost unknown as a composer and only slightly appreciated as a pianist. By the time the work was completed four years later, however, he had achieved such fame and fortune in Paris that he could dedicate the piece to Baron de Stockhausen, the Hanoverian ambassador to France, whom he counted among his noble pupils. Breitkopf und Härtel published the work in Leipzig in June 1836. (Chalgrin’s Arc de Triomphe and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots were also completed during that year.) Robert Schumann called this Ballade “the most spirited and daring work of Chopin,” and

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14 reported that it was inspired by Mickiewicz’s Konrad Valenrod, a poetic epic concerning battles between the pagan Lithuanians and the Christian Knights of the Teutonic Order. The work exhibits both the ingenious conflation of sectional, sonata and rondo forms and the voluptuous, wide-ranging harmonic palette that mark all of Chopin’s Ballades.

Sonata in B minor (1852-1853)

© JIYANG CHEN; © SHAO TING KUEI

FR ANZ LISZT (1811-1886)

Liszt composed his revolutionary B minor Piano Sonata in 1852-1853. The procedure on which he built this Sonata (as well as his Second Concerto and many of his orchestral tone poems) is called “thematic transformation,” or, to use the rather more jolly phrase of 19th-century American critic William Foster Apthorp, “The Life and Adventures of a Melody.” Never bothered that he was ignoring the Classical models of form, Liszt concocted his own new structures around this transformation process. (“Music is never stationary,” he pronounced. “Successive forms and styles can only be like so many resting places — like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal.”) Basically, the “thematic transformation” process consists of inventing a theme that can be used to create a wide variety of moods, tempos, harmonies and rhythms to suggest whatever emotional states are required by the different sections of the piece.

There are at least four such sections played continuously in Liszt’s Piano Sonata, which correspond roughly to “first movement,” “slow movement,” “finale” and “coda.” The principal theme, presented after seven measures of slow introduction, comprises two motivic components: a leaping exclamation followed by a dramatic triplet figure; and an ominous quick-note gesture in the low register. It is from these two pregnant fragments that the magnificent and thoroughly integrated structure of this Sonata is built. The only important melodic contrast is provided by a bold, striding theme introduced above repeated chords.

THURSDAY JULY 14, 1:00PM FREE CONCERT SERIES

VAIL INTERFAITH CHAPEL Tomer Gewirtzman, piano Steven Lin, piano HAYDN Sonata in C major, Hoboken XVI: 50 Allegro Adagio Allegro molto CHOPIN Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 LISZT Sonata in B minor

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STEVEN LIN

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SCHEDULE OF EVENTS 2016 SEASON June 23–August 6, 2016 COLOR KEY Orchestra Concerts

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New York Philharmonic 6:00PM | GRFA

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Little Listeners 2:00PM | EPL

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FRIDAY 24

Academy of St Martin in the Fields 6:00PM | GRFA

SATURDAY 25 Pre-Concert Talk 5:00PM | GRFA Academy of St Martin in the Fields 6:00PM | GRFA

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Dallas Symphony Orchestra 6:00PM | GRFA

Little Listeners 2:00PM | EPL

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BARTÓK & BARBER Out of Doors (Five Piano Pieces) (1926) BÉL A BARTÓK (1881-1945)

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ut of Doors, composed in Budapest between June and August 1926, was written as a vehicle for Bartók’s own performances; the Piano Concerto No. 1, Piano Sonata and Nine Little Piano Pieces were created at the same time to serve a similar purpose. The work’s name was derived from the movement titles and the scenes they describe: With Drums and Pipes; Barcarolla; Musettes; The Night’s Music and The Chase. Bartók left no more specific information than this, but his son Béla gave the following information about The Night’s Music: “He often visited his sister in Pusztaszöllös. This is where The Night’s Music originated, in which my father captured the frogs’ concert in the quiet of the plain and other evocative sounds.”

With Drums and Pipes is a sardonic march, sometimes out-of-step with itself, which transmutes the cadences of a street parade into motoric, percussive piano figurations. The Barcarolla is a Venetian boating song translated into Bartók’s unique Hungarian dialect. (He had visited Venice with his wife, Ditta, two years before.) The musette was a small bagpipe whose drone and diatonic melodic leadings were mimicked in many Baroque keyboard pieces; Bartók’s Musettes evokes the peasant dances of the villages where he carried out his extensive folk music researches.

The Night’s Music is an extraordinary tonal picture: “Some kind of sobbing and vaguely remote music, bird-music, star-music, and the calm transcendental melody of the night’s majestic hymn,” wrote Aladár Tóth, a Hungarian critic and contemporary of the composer.

Four elements comprise the music: a slow progression of soft, tightly packed, dissonant chord clusters (representing, perhaps, nature itself); tiny, disjointed motives, some flying quickly across the registers, others just repeating tones (nature’s creatures); a 38

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broad hymnal theme (man contemplating nature); and a rapid melody of small intervals (a shepherd’s pipe). The Chase is a virtuoso depiction of a wild hunt, driven relentlessly by a hammered ostinato (i.e., short, repeated motive) in the bass.

Notturno Incantato (“Enchanted Nocturne”) (2014) DAVID HERTZBERG (B. 1990)

David Hertzberg, born in Los Angeles in 1990, began his musical studies in violin, piano and composition at the city’s distinguished Colburn School and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard, where he studied with Samuel Adler, and an Artist Diploma from Curtis; he pursued further advanced study in Darmstadt, Berlin and Paris.

Hertzberg has fulfilled commissions from Harvard, American Composers Orchestra, BMI, American Composers Forum, Jerome Foundation, Juilliard and New York City Opera.

Among Hertzberg’s rapidly accumulating distinctions are the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, Aaron Copland Award from Copland House, the inaugural Catherine Doctorow Prize from Gotham Chamber Opera, Arthur Friedman Prize and residencies at Young Concert Artists, Visby International Center for Composers in Sweden, Yaddo and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival; he began a three-year residency with Opera Philadelphia and MusicTheatre Group in 2015.

Notturno Incantato (“Enchanted Nocturne”) was composed in 2013 on a co-commission from Concert Artists Guild and the Curtis Institute of Music for Steven Lin, who premiered the work at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York on February 11, 2014.

Hertzberg wrote, “Although my Notturno Incantato was conceived as an abstract piece of music, throughout the course of its composition certain images and impressions

JUL suggested themselves to me. The following lines are an ekphrastic response [i.e., a graphic or literary response to a visual work of art] to my own composition, written upon completing the piece: draped in darkness, she lays her languid limbs across the earth a music lithe and distant is exhumed in the faintness of her undulating breath

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and in the swell of supple silence beneath her veil, unseen,

Tomer Gewirtzman, piano Steven Lin, piano

celestial cinders whisper secret syllables in their ever-ancient tongue.

BARTÓK Out of Doors (Five Piano Pieces) With Drums and Pipes: Pesante Barcarolla: Andante Musettes: Moderato The Night’s Music: Lento The Chase: Presto

Souvenirs for Piano, Four Hands, Op. 28 (1951-1952) SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981)

One of Samuel Barber’s favorite relaxations after he was discharged from the Army Air Force at the end of World War II and settled in his new home at Mt. Kisco, New York was traveling into Manhattan to hear the music at the city’s nightclubs. Among the spots he visited most often with one friend, pianist Charles Turner, was the Blue Angel Club, where a two-piano team, Edie and Rack, played sophisticated arrangements of popular and show tunes. Turner encouraged Barber to compose something of a similar nature they could play together, and in 1951, he began writing down some lighthearted numbers for four-hand piano in turn-of-the-20thcentury dance styles that grew into the set of six Souvenirs: Waltz, Schottische (a round dance similar to a slow polka), Pas de Deux, Two-Step, Hesitation-Tango, and Galop. The ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein heard Barber and Turner play Souvenirs at a New York party early in 1952, and he suggested that Barber orchestrate them as a ballet. Though the ballet was not to be premiered for more than three years, Barber indicated the music’s theatrical context in a preface to the piano score, published in 1954: “One might imagine a divertissement in a setting reminiscent of the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in New York, the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos; Souvenirs — remembered with affection, not in irony or with tongue in the cheek, but in amused tenderness.”

HERTZBERG Notturno Incantato BARBER Souvenirs for Piano, Four Hands, Op. 28 Waltz Schottische Pas de Deux Two-Step Hesitation-Tango Galop

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DOVER & DOHNÁNYI Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48, No. 1 (1841) FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)

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hopin’s two Nocturnes, Op. 48 were products of 1841, the time of his greatest happiness with George Sand, when he was at the height of his creative powers. They were published in Paris later that year and in Leipzig soon thereafter with a dedication to Laura Duperré, one of Chopin’s favorite pupils. Musicologist Herbert Weinstock called the C minor Nocturne, Op. 48, No. 1, “Chopin’s major effort in that genre. Here is one of his compositional triumphs.” The work’s breadth of scale, range and intensity of emotion, and peerless control of form and figuration make it one of the supreme masterpieces of the Romantic keyboard literature.

Sonata-Idylle, Op. 56 (1937) NICOL AS MEDTNER (1880-1951)

To a small group of faithful followers, Nicolas Medtner was the creative and pianistic equal of his two famous Russian contemporaries, Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff; to most music lovers he is almost unknown.

Medtner, born in Moscow on January 5, 1880 into a family of German extraction, had begun playing piano under his mother’s guidance by age six and entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1892. After his graduation, in 1900, he toured successfully through European musical capitals, but in 1903 he began publishing his works and decided to make his career thereafter primarily as a composer. His music attracted the attention of Sergei Rachmaninoff, another recent Moscow Conservatory graduate, who was to become a life-long friend and champion. (“You are, in my opinion, the greatest composer of our time,” Rachmaninoff told him.) Medtner established a fine reputation in Moscow — in 1909, he 40

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won the Glinka Prize for some Goethe songs and was appointed to the piano faculty of the Conservatory — but he found little acceptance of his music elsewhere. The turmoil of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution severely disrupted his life, and in 1921 he moved to Berlin, where he was able to survive only with financial help from Rachmaninoff. Following modestly successful tours of Europe and America and several years of unsettled living in France, Germany and Britain, Medtner moved permanently to London in 1935. He inspired devotion from a handful of adherents in Britain and enjoyed an extraordinary stroke of good fortune in 1946 when the Maharajah of Mysore sponsored the foundation of a Medtner Society to allow the composer to record many of his most important works. A series of heart attacks impaired Medtner’s health and limited his playing during the last years before his death, in London on November 13, 1951.

The Sonata-Idylle, the last of Medtner’s ten sonatas for his instrument, was composed in 1937, two years after he had settled in London.

The work’s modest twelve-minute length and halcyon mood seem to have resulted from his publisher’s request to write something more accessible to (gifted) amateur pianists than his earlier virtuoso scores, but it might also reflect a certain satisfaction with his new home after a trying period in his life. For the technically minded, the opening Pastorale is a ternary structure with a somewhat more animated central episode, smooth melodic movement, moderate triple meter, and modest but precisely etched counterpoint; for the more romantic soul, it is a dance of ethereal sylphs in a sun-dappled, mythological grove.

The sonata-form second (and final) movement is built from three genial themes: a melody of short, arching phrases that begins with a gentle syncopation; a playful motive in skipping triplet rhythms; and a lyrical strain whose opening notes resemble Somewhere Over the Rainbow (which, completely coincidentally, Harold Arlen, the son of a Russian-born cantor, was

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composing in Hollywood for The Wizard of Oz at exactly the same time).

Quintet No. 1 for Piano and String Quartet in C minor, Op. 1 (1895)

© LISA-MARIE MAZZUCCO

ERNST VON DOHNÁNYI (1877-1960)

Ernst von Dohnányi, one of Hungary’s foremost 20th-century composers, pianists, teachers and music administrators, composed the Piano Quintet No. 1 in 1895, when he was eighteen and still a student at the Franz Liszt Academy; after having written nearly seventy pieces during his teenage years, he deemed it the first of his compositions worthy of an opus number. The work’s premiere in Budapest that same year drew the attention of Brahms, who sponsored the performance of the Quintet in Vienna that helped to establish Dohnányi’s international reputation as a composer. The opening movement, passionate, spacious and almost symphonic in scale and sonority, takes as its main theme a bold, striding melody announced by the piano. An arching phrase in the cello provides the transition to the movement’s formal second theme, a sweetly lyrical strain given by the strings.

The development treats all three themes and reaches its climax just as the recapitulation begins. After the thematic materials are returned in expressively heightened settings, a majestic reworking of the principal subject brings the movement to a confident close.

The Scherzo, with its fiery cross-rhythms and headlong energy, is reminiscent of the Bohemian furiant; a gently swaying central Trio provides formal and expressive balance.

The elegiac Adagio follows a broad three-part form (A–B–A), with a poignant theme first sung by the viola heard in the outer sections and a more passionate strain occupying the center of the movement. The finale summarizes the remarkable state of Dohnányi’s craft and creative gifts at the outset of his career: a Classical rondo form whose reiterations of a folk-influenced, mixed-meter theme are separated by episodes of Schubertian lyricism, Bach-inspired fugue and even a recall of the first movement’s principal theme to round out the Quintet’s structure, all concluded by a coda of Beethovenian triumph.

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DOVER QUARTET Joel Link, violin Bryan Lee, violin Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola Camden Shaw, cello Tomer Gewirtzman, piano Steven Lin, piano CHOPIN Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48 No. 1 MEDTNER Sonata-Idylle, Op. 56 DOHNÁNYI Quintet No. 1 for Piano and String Quartet in C minor, Op. 1 Allegro Scherzo: Allegro vivace Adagio, quasi andante Finale: Allegro animato

DOVER QUARTET

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BEETHOVEN’S “RAZUMOVSKY” Pale Blue Dot (2014) DAVID LUDWIG (B. 1974)

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avid Ludwig, born in 1974 in Doylestown in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is the descendant of a distinguished musical family — pianists Rudolf Serkin and Peter Serkin are his grandfather and uncle, and his greatgrandfather was the renowned violinist Adolf Busch. Ludwig studied at Oberlin College (B.M.) and the Manhattan School of Music (M.M.), and continued his post-graduate work at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School before earning a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania; his teachers include Richard Hoffmann, Richard Danielpour, Jennifer Higdon, Ned Rorem and John Corigliano. In 2002, Ludwig was appointed to the faculty of the Curtis Institute, where he now serves as the Artistic Chair of Performance and Director of the Curtis 20/21 Contemporary Music Ensemble. He was Young-Composer-inResidence at the Marlboro Music Festival from 1997 to 1999, and has also held residencies at Yaddo, Aspen Music Festival, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Académie Musicale de Villecroze, Pacific Music Festival, Isabella Gardner Art Museum in Boston, Vermont Symphony, Seoul National University, Shanghai International Summer Music Festival and Atlantic Center Composers and Singers Program in Florence, Italy; he was 2015 Composer-in-Residence at Music from Angel Fire. His honors include the First Music Award, Independence Foundation Fellowship, Theodore Presser Foundation Career Grant, Fleischer Orchestra Award and two nominations for the Stoeger Award of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has also received grants from Meet the Composer, American Composers Forum, American Music Center and National Endowment for the Arts; in 2009 he was honored as a City Cultural Leader by the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, and in 2011 NPR Music selected him as one of the “Top 100 42

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Composers Under Forty in the World.”

Ludwig wrote of Pale Blue Dot, commissioned by the Caramoor Festival and premiered by the Dover String Quartet on July 11, 2014, “I am inspired by astronomy and always have been. In 1990, the visionary astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who worked on the Voyager missions, asked NASA to turn Voyager around and take a deep space portrait of Earth looking back as it was leaving the solar system from six billion miles away.

When you look at this picture, you see first the long rays of sunlight refracted off of Voyager’s camera. In the bottom right of the photo is a bright little speck, not quite even a full pixel, and that is our home, the Earth. The photo is titled appropriately Pale Blue Dot and Dr. Sagan wrote beautifully about it: “‘From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’

“Those thoughts and images are the inspiration for my Pale Blue Dot.”

Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, “Razumovsky” (1806) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Count Andreas Kyrillovitch Razumovsky was one of the most prominent figures in Viennese

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© LISA-MARIE MAZZUCCO

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society, politics and art at the turn of the 19th century. Born in 1752 to a singer at the Russian court, he ingratiated himself with a number of women of lofty station and entered the diplomatic corps at the age of 25. In 1788 in Vienna, Razumovsky married Elizabeth, Countess of Thun and sister of Prince Lichnowsky, one of Beethoven’s most devoted patrons. Four years later, he was assigned as Russian ambassador to Vienna, whose sybaritic life style perfectly suited his personality. Razumovsky was also an accomplished violinist who indulged his interest in music by taking lessons from Haydn, playing in chamber concerts, and sponsoring the performance of works in his residence. In the spring of 1806, he took over from Prince Lichnowsky the patronage of the string quartet headed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, and commissioned Beethoven to write three new pieces to be played in the grand palace he was building on the Danube Canal near the Prater. In honor of (or, perhaps, at the request of) his Russian patron, Beethoven included in the first two quartets of the Op. 59 set traditional Russian themes.

The Razumovsky Quartet No. 3 in C major opens with an almost motionless introduction, influenced, perhaps, in its harmonic acerbity by the beginning of Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet.

The mood brightens with the presentation of the main theme by the unaccompanied first violin, and there ensues a powerful movement in fully developed sonata form. Dark currents of feeling pulse beneath the rippling surface of the Andante: “A lament [that] searches many shadowy corners,” wrote Vincent d’Indy of this music; J.W.N. Sullivan thought that it presents “some forgotten and alien despair;” a “mystery of the primitive” concluded Joseph Kerman of it. The third movement, nominally a Minuet, is of a Romantic sensibility that leaves far behind the elegance and simple grace of its model. The finale is a whirlwind blend of rondo, sonata and fugue that demonstrates Beethoven’s mastery of contrapuntal techniques and incomparable ability to drive a composition to its seemingly inevitable end.

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DOVER QUARTET Joel Link, violin Bryan Lee, violin Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola Camden Shaw, cello LUDWIG Pale Blue Dot BEETHOVEN Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, “Razumovsky” Andante con moto — Allegro vivace Andante con moto quasi Allegretto Menuetto: Grazioso — Allegro molto

DOVER QUARTET

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FRENCH IMPRESSIONS La Cheminée du Roi René for Woodwind Quintet, Op. 205 (1939) DARIUS MILHAUD (1892-1974)

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n 1939, French film director Raymond Bernard asked Roger Désormières, Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud to compose the soundtrack for his Cavalcade d’amour, a three-part love story by the renowned dramatist Jean Anouilh set respectively in the Middle Ages, 1830 and 1930. Darius Milhaud, a native of Aix-en-Provence, chose the first segment, which takes place during the reign of King René d’Anjou. René (1409-1480) ruled large parts of southeast France and northwest Italy and was instrumental in finally securing French control of Normandy from the English in 1450. He was a benevolent ruler and a generous patron of the arts (he authored a treatise on tournaments as well as poems and allegorical romances), and he became a beloved figure among his subjects.

After arriving in Oakland, California in 1940 to teach at Mills College, Milhaud arranged excerpts from his film score as a suite for woodwind quintet titled La Cheminée du Roi René. The title is puzzling. “Cheminée” in French generally means “chimney” or “fireplace.” Some commentators have construed the name to mean that René shed the warmth of goodness and enlightenment among his people, a sort of Provençal predecessor of Louis XIV, Le roi soleil — “The Sun King”; others hold that it indicates René’s presence is still felt so strongly that he could seemingly step down from the chimney-like column bearing his statue in Aix-en-Provence, where he died, and walk again among his subjects. More in keeping with the work’s ebullient spirit and evocative movement titles, however, is the possibility that cheminée is a Medieval variant of the verb cheminer — “to walk, proceed.” Milhaud’s movements suggest just such a “Procession of King René”: an opening Cortège (a ceremonial procession); 44

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

Aubade (a morning song); Jongleurs (jugglers and acrobats); La Maousinglade (the region of Aix countryside where Milhaud lived in 1939); Joutes sur l’Arc (“Jousts on the Arc,” described in the score as “nautical journeys that took place on the River Arc, near Aix-en-Provence, in olden times”); Chasse à Valabre (“Hunting at Valabre,” “a little castle where King René was accustomed to go for his hunting parties”); and Madrigal-Nocturne (“the suite ends in a slow poetical atmosphere”).

Trois Pièces Brèves for Woodwind Quintet (1930) JACQUES IBERT (1890-1962)

Jacques Ibert’s fine craft, good humor and distinctive Gallic sensibilities are all embodied in the Trois Pièces Brèves that he composed for woodwind quintet in 1930. The first movement opens with a spirited introduction which leads to a cheerful theme that sounds like an English jig on holiday in Paris. Some ideas from the introduction are bandied about before the jig tune returns to round out the movement. The Andante is a delicate duet for flute and clarinet modeled on the two-part inventions of Bach; the other instruments enter only to provide a tiny coda. The finale is a vest-pocket sonata form, with a mock-serious introduction, a bounding main theme begun by the clarinet, a parody waltz as the second subject (also initiated by the clarinet), a brief development section and a recapitulation of both themes.

Divertissement for Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon (1947) and Woodwind Quintet No. 1 for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and Horn (1948) JEAN FR ANÇAIX (1912-1997)

A divertissement is a musical confection meant to divert, to delight, to amuse, and Jean Françaix’s Divertissement for Oboe, Clarinet

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and Bassoon, bubbling with the composer’s distinctive insouciance and wit, more than lives up to its title. The Prélude begins as a sweet pastoral but certain disagreements among the participants as to rhythmic coordination and wayward pitches give the music an invigorating piquancy. These disparities are discussed in a more animated manner in the center section before the pastoral music, little changed from before, returns to close the movement. The collegial contention carries into the Allegretto assai, which the oboe and clarinet start as a dapper quick march while the bassoon tries out the accompaniment for a waltz. The trio eventually settles on a cheerful metric common ground and celebrates its unanimity with a few phrases reminiscent of a tango.

The opening music is more amicable when it returns. The Elégie is thoughtful rather than tragic. The Scherzo juxtaposes tart phrases of spiky rhythms and leaping intervals with sweet episodes of limpid motion and smooth contours.

Françaix’s Woodwind Quintet No. 1, written in 1948 for the solo woodwind players of the Orchestre National de Paris, opens with a soft, slow, expressively ambiguous introduction that pauses on a dying chord before launching into the movement’s buoyant principal section.

Quick repeated notes on the horn herald the main theme, a sweeping clarinet display to which the horn then gives a raucous Bronx cheer. The horn takes for itself the second theme, a vaguely waltz-like melody with quirky chromatic motion. The main theme shows up again after a little pause, and the movement comes round full circle with a broad transformation of the melody from the introduction. The second movement is an insouciant scherzo with a gentle central trio upon which the faster music of the opening section makes a couple of clattering intrusions.

The third movement is a theme with five contrasting variations. The finale — “in the style of a French march,” according to the score — is a brilliant showpiece for the ensemble.

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QWINDA WOODWIND QUINTET

Niles Watson, flute William Welter, oboe Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet Emeline Chong, bassoon Jenny Ney, horn

MILHAUD La Cheminée du Roi René for Woodwind Quintet, Op. 205 (13 minutes) Cortège Aubade Jongleurs La Maousinglade Joutes sur l’Arc Chasse à Valabre Madrigal–Nocturne

IBERT Trois Pièces Brèves for Woodwind Quintet (7 minutes) Allegro Andante Assez lent — Allegro scherzando — Vivo — Tempo I — Vivo

FRANÇAIX Divertissement for Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon (10 minutes) Prélude: Moderato — Più vivo, poco portamento, animato — Tempo I — Allegretto assai Elégie: Grave Scherzo

FRANÇAIX Woodwind Quintet No. 1 (19 minutes) Andante tranquillo — Allegro assai Presto — Trio: Un poco più lento — Presto — Coda Tema con variazione: Andante Variation I: L’istesso tempo Variation II: Andantino con moto Variation III: Lento Variation IV: Vivo Variation V: Andante Tempo di marcia francese

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QWINDA IN EAGLE Five Easy Dances for Woodwind Quintet (1956) DENES AG AY (1911-2007)

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omposer, conductor, author and arranger Denes Agay was born in Hungary and trained at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, but was driven to America in 1939 by the Nazis. Agay wrote nearly a hundred books on musical subjects and composed for films and concert, including his delightful tongue-in-cheek Five Easy Dances of 1956.

La Cheminée du Roi René for Woodwind Quintet, Op. 205 (1939) DARIUS MILHAUD (1892-1974)

In 1939, French film director Raymond Bernard asked Roger Désormières, Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud to compose the soundtrack for his Cavalcade d’amour, a threepart love story by the renowned dramatist Jean Anouilh set respectively in the Middle Ages, 1830 and 1930. Darius Milhaud, a native of Aix-en-Provence, chose the first segment, which takes place during the reign of King René d’Anjou. René (1409-1480) ruled large parts of southeast France and northwest Italy and was instrumental in finally securing French control of Normandy from the English in 1450. He was a benevolent ruler and a generous patron of the arts (he authored a treatise on tournaments as well as poems and allegorical romances), and he became a beloved figure among his subjects.

After arriving in Oakland, California in 1940 to teach at Mills College, Milhaud arranged excerpts from his film score as a suite for woodwind quintet titled La Cheminée du Roi René. The title is puzzling. “Cheminée” in French generally means “chimney” or “fireplace.” Some commentators have construed the name to mean that René shed the warmth of goodness and enlightenment among his people, a sort of Provençal predecessor of Louis XIV, Le roi soleil — “The 46

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

Sun King”; others hold that it indicates René’s presence is still felt so strongly that he could seemingly step down from the chimney-like column bearing his statue in Aix-en-Provence, where he died, and walk again among his subjects. More in keeping with the work’s ebullient spirit and evocative movement titles, however, is the possibility that cheminée is a Medieval variant of the verb cheminer — “to walk, proceed.” Milhaud’s movements suggest just such a “Procession of King René”: an opening Cortège (a ceremonial procession); Aubade (a morning song); Jongleurs (jugglers and acrobats); La Maousinglade (the region of Aix countryside where Milhaud lived in 1939); Joutes sur l’Arc (“Jousts on the Arc,” described in the score as “nautical journeys that took place on the River Arc, near Aix-en-Provence, in olden times”); Chasse à Valabre (“Hunting at Valabre,” “a little castle where King René was accustomed to go for his hunting parties”); and Madrigal-Nocturne (“the suite ends in a slow poetical atmosphere”).

Trois Pièces Brèves for Woodwind Quintet (1930) JACQUES IBERT (1890-1962)

Jacques Ibert’s fine craft, good humor and distinctive Gallic sensibilities are all embodied in the Trois Pièces Brèves that he composed for woodwind quintet in 1930. The first movement opens with a spirited introduction which leads to a cheerful theme that sounds like an English jig on holiday in Paris. Some ideas from the introduction are bandied about before the jig tune returns to round out the movement. The Andante is a delicate duet for flute and clarinet modeled on the two-part inventions of Bach; the other instruments enter only to provide a tiny coda. The finale is a vest-pocket sonata form, with a mock-serious introduction, a bounding main theme begun by the clarinet, a parody waltz as the second subject (also initiated by the clarinet), a brief development section and a recapitulation of both themes.

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28 Trois Pièces pour Une Musique de Nuit (“Three Night Music Pieces”) for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon (1954) EUGÈNE BOZZA (1905-1991)

Eugène Bozza composed three operas, two ballets, two symphonies, two oratorios, four Masses and a half-dozen concertos, but his most important contribution to 20thcentury French music were his myriad of pieces for wind instruments. Bozza, born in Nice in 1905, took his professional training at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won Premiers Prix in violin (1924), conducting (1930) and composition (1934), as well as the Prix de Rome in 1934. He began his career as a violinist with the Pasdeloup Orchestra, but gave up performing in 1930 to devote himself to composition and conducting.

From 1938 to 1948, he conducted at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and in 1951, he was appointed director of the École Nationale de Musique in Valenciennes, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. He died in Valenciennes in 1991. British critic Paul Griffiths wrote of the “melodic fluency, elegance of structure, and consistently sensitive concern for instrumental capabilities” of Bozza’s music, qualities exemplified by his 1954 Trois Pièces pour Une Musique de Nuit (“Three Night Music Pieces”): a poignant melody with the lolling rhythm of a barcarolle, the traditional song of the Venetian gondoliers, an elfin scherzo and an austere chorale that suggests a nighttime prayer.

Overture to The Barber of Seville (1816) GIOACCHINO ROSSINI (1792-1868)

Rossini was said to have based the original Overture to The Barber of Seville, appropriately enough, on Spanish themes. That piece, however, was lost in transit somewhere between Rome and Bologna, so he simply replaced it with the instrumental number he had composed for Elisabetta in Naples the year before, which in its turn had been adapted from the Overture to Aureliano in Palmira of 1813, an adventure of the Emperor Aurelian in Palmyra in the third century of the Christian era.

THURSDAY JULY 28, 11:00AM FREE CONCERT SERIES

GOLDEN EAGLE SENIOR CENTER

QWINDA WOODWIND QUINTET

Niles Watson, flute William Welter, oboe Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet Emeline Chong, bassoon Jenny Ney, horn

AGAY Five Easy Dances for Woodwind Quintet Polka Tango Bolero Waltz Rumba MILHAUD La Cheminée du Roi René for Woodwind Quintet, Op. 205 Cortège Aubade Jongleurs La Maousinglade Joutes sur l’Arc Chasse à Valabre Madrigal–Nocturne IBERT Trois Pièces Brèves for Woodwind Quintet Allegro Andante Assez lent — Allegro scherzando — Vivo — Tempo I — Vivo BOZZA Trois Pièces pour Une Musique de Nuit for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon Andantino Allegro vivo Moderato ROSSINI Overture to The Barber of Seville for Woodwind Quintet

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MOZART & RAVEL Quintet for Piano, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and Horn in E-flat major, K. 452 (1784) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

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ozart’s personal happiness and public popularity were at their zeniths in 1784. He shared a comfortable apartment with Constanze, and they were looking forward to the birth of a baby in September. He had been settled in Vienna for nearly three years, and had acquired a reputation as the finest pianist in town as well as a talented composer. So great was the demand for his performances in the city’s concert halls and the houses of the aristocracy that he played 22 concerts between February 26th and April 3rd. This hectic schedule alone would be enough to fully occupy any solo performer, but the Viennese audience also expected that “I must play some new works and therefore I must compose,” he wrote. In addition, many of his mornings were given over to teaching, with the remaining cracks in his schedule devoted to carrying on a quite merry social life. “Have I not enough to do? I do not think I can get rusty at this rate,” he wrote in a letter to Papa Leopold in Salzburg, with which he proudly enclosed a list of his performances. For his program of April 1st at the Burgtheater, which also included the Concertos Nos. 15 and 16 (K. 450 and K. 451) and Symphonies No. 35 (“Haffner”) and No. 36 (“Linz”), Mozart composed the Quintet for Piano and Winds (K. 452), completing it just the night before the concert.

The Quintet’s opening movement, bursting with melody, begins with a slow introduction followed by a sonata-form essay with a tiny development section. (One- or two-keyed 18th-century wind instruments were limited in their chromatic possibilities, and did not lend

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themselves to the harmonic peregrinations of Mozart’s more elaborate thematic developments.) The Larghetto, also in sonata form, is sweet and limpid. The finale is a perky rondo with a written-out cadenza near the end marked by entrances in close imitation.

Ritornello for Five E M I LY C O O L E Y ( B . 1 9 9 0 )

Emily Cooley, born in Milwaukee in 1990, earned degrees from Yale University and the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, and currently holds the Anthony B. Creamer III Annual Fellowship at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studies with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon; her other teachers include David Ludwig, Stephen Hartke, Donald Crockett, Andrew Norman, Kathryn Alexander and John K. Boyle. Cooley has received commissions and performances from many noted orchestras and chamber ensembles, and is also is a founding member and publicity director for Kettle Corn New Music, which produces a year-round series of concerts in New York City. She has received awards and recognition from the American Composers Orchestra, Tribeca New Music, ASCAP, Renée B. Fisher Foundation, Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, LA Phil National Composers Intensive and PARMA Recordings; in 2015, Emily Cooley was awarded a prestigious Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Cooley wrote, “A ritornello is a short passage that returns throughout a piece. In Ritornello for Five, the opening music returns several times, interspersed with other episodes. Each time the ritornello appears, the tempo is slightly slower than the previous time, and other features of the material are altered. The piece ends with the ritornello in a slow, chorale-like texture.”

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Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917)

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MAURICE R AVEL (1875-1937) ARRANGED FOR WIND QUINTET BY MASON JONES (1919-2009)

The inspiration for Le Tombeau de Couperin came from two obsessions that filled Ravel’s mind in 1917 — the sorrow caused by World War I and the need to retain the sanity represented by the tradition of French culture.

In the piano suite that was the first version of Le Tombeau, each of the movements was dedicated to one of six friends who had fallen on the battlefield. In a similar way, composers of the French Baroque age, François Couperin (1668-1733) among them, paid tribute in music to recently deceased colleagues. Such a piece was called a “tombeau,” literally a “tomb,” and Ravel intended such an association here. Beside just a way of eulogizing his comrades, however, the association with Couperin also represented for Ravel the continuity of the logic and refinement of French civilization. The title of Le Tombeau de Couperin, therefore, has a triple meaning: it is a memorial to close friends; it is a revival of some aspects of the musical style of the French Baroque; and, probably most significant for Ravel, it is a continuation of the venerable tradition of French culture and thought in a time of despair and nihilism.

The arrangement of Le Tombeau de Couperin for woodwind quintet is by Mason Jones, Principal Horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1939 to 1978, co-founder of the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet, and faculty member of the Curtis Institute of Music. The gossamer Prélude contains some dazzling solo and ensemble virtuosity. The Fugue, based on a delicate, tear-drop theme, is an ethereal revival of the noblest of the Baroque contrapuntal forms. The Menuet is the most durable of all Baroque dances. The Rigaudon is a vigorous duple-meter dance that originated in Provence.

QWINDA WOODWIND QUINTET

Niles Watson, flute William Welter, oboe Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet Emeline Chong, bassoon Jenny Ney, horn

Anne-Marie McDermott, piano MOZART Quintet for Piano, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and Horn in E-flat major, K. 452 Largo — Allegro moderato Larghetto Rondo: Allegretto COOLEY Ritornello for Five RAVEL Le Tombeau de Couperin for Woodwind Quintet Prélude: Vif Fugue Menuet: Allegro moderato Rigaudon: Assez vif

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QWINDA AT GALLERY ROW Five Easy Dances for Woodwind Quintet (1956) DENES AG AY (1911-2007)

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omposer, conductor, author and arranger Denes Agay was born in Hungary and trained at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, but was driven to America in 1939 by the Nazis. Agay wrote nearly a hundred books on musical subjects and composed for films and concert, including his delightful tongue-in-cheek Five Easy Dances of 1956.

La Cheminée du Roi René for Woodwind Quintet, Op. 205 (1939) DARIUS MILHAUD (1892-1974)

In 1939, French film director Raymond Bernard asked Roger Désormières, Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud to compose the soundtrack for his Cavalcade d’amour, a threepart love story by the renowned dramatist Jean Anouilh set respectively in the Middle Ages, 1830 and 1930. Darius Milhaud, a native of Aix-en-Provence, chose the first segment, which takes place during the reign of King René d’Anjou. René (1409-1480) ruled large parts of southeast France and northwest Italy and was instrumental in finally securing French control of Normandy from the English in 1450. He was a benevolent ruler and a generous patron of the arts, and he became a beloved figure among his subjects.

After arriving in Oakland, California in 1940 to teach at Mills College, Milhaud arranged excerpts from his film score as a suite for woodwind quintet titled La Cheminée du Roi René. The title is puzzling. “Cheminée” in French generally means “chimney” or “fireplace.” Some commentators have construed the name to mean that René shed the warmth of goodness and enlightenment among his people, a sort of Provençal predecessor of Louis XIV, Le roi soleil — “The 50

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Sun King”; others hold that it indicates René’s presence is still felt so strongly that he could seemingly step down from the chimney-like column bearing his statue in Aix-en-Provence, where he died, and walk again among his subjects. More in keeping with the work’s ebullient spirit and evocative movement titles, however, is the possibility that cheminée is a Medieval variant of the verb cheminer — “to walk, proceed.” Milhaud’s movements suggest just such a “Procession of King René”: an opening Cortège (a ceremonial procession); Aubade (a morning song); Jongleurs (jugglers and acrobats); La Maousinglade (the region of Aix countryside where Milhaud lived in 1939); Joutes sur l’Arc (“Jousts on the Arc,” described in the score as “nautical journeys that took place on the River Arc, near Aix-en-Provence, in olden times”); Chasse à Valabre (“Hunting at Valabre,” “a little castle where King René was accustomed to go for his hunting parties”); and Madrigal-Nocturne (“the suite ends in a slow poetical atmosphere”).

Aires Tropicales for Woodwind Quintet (1994) PAQUITO D’RIVERA (B. 1948)

Cuban-born composer, clarinetist and saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera has won sixteen Grammy awards — the first artist to receive Grammys in both Classical and Latin Jazz categories — and received the National Medal for the Arts at the White House and designation as an NEA Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. Since appearing as soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Roger Kellaway’s David Street Blues in 1988, D’Rivera has also built a reputation as a classical performer and composer whose works blend the influences of Cuban, African, American, jazz, popular and classical idioms. His Aires Tropicales is based on several of the most popular Latin dance styles.

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29 Libertango for Woodwind Quintet (1974) ASTOR PIAZZOLL A (1921-1992)

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The greatest master of the modern tango was Astor Piazzolla, born in Mar Del Plata, Argentina in 1921 and raised in New York City, where he lived with his father from 1924 to 1937. Before Astor was ten years old, his musical talents had been discovered by Carlos Gardel, then the most famous of all performers and composers of tangos and a cultural hero in Argentina. At Gardel’s urging, the young Astor returned to Buenos Aires in 1937 and joined the popular tango orchestra of Anibal Troilo as arranger and bandoneón player.

Piazzolla studied classical composition with Alberto Ginastera in Buenos Aires, and in 1954, he wrote a symphony for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic that earned him a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. When Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, he founded his own performing group and began to create a modern style for the tango that combined elements of traditional tango, Argentinean folk music and contemporary classical, jazz and popular techniques into a “Nuevo Tango” that was as suitable for the concert hall as for the dance floor.

In 1974, Piazzolla moved to Rome, claiming that “I’m sure I’m going to write better there than in Buenos Aires.” His European agent, Aldo Pagani, set him up with an apartment near the Piazza Navona, guaranteed him $500 a month for living expenses, and started arranging appearances and recordings, beginning with a program on Italian television with Charles Aznavour on March 25, 1974. When Pagani urged him to compose pieces that were short enough to be easily programmed on the radio, Piazzolla protested, “But Beethoven wrote …”

“Beethoven died deaf and poor,” the agent told his client. “Up to this point, you are neither deaf nor poor.” Piazzolla took Pagani’s point, and wrote a series of short instrumental pieces during the following months, including the hard-driving Libertango, which the composer called “a sort of song of liberty,” a release of new ideas inspired by a new place.

GALLERY ROW, BEAVER CREEK

QWINDA WOODWIND QUINTET

Niles Watson, flute William Welter, oboe Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet Emeline Chong, bassoon Jenny Ney, horn

AGAY Five Easy Dances for Woodwind Quintet Polka Tango Bolero Waltz Rumba MILHAUD La Cheminée du Roi René for Woodwind Quintet, Op. 205 Cortège Aubade Jongleurs La Maousinglade Joutes sur l’Arc Chasse à Valabre D’RIVERA Aires Tropicales for Woodwind Quintet Alborada Son Vals Venezolano Habanera Dizziness Afro Contradanza PIAZZOLLA Libertango for Woodwind Quintet

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A NIGHT IN ITALY Overture to The Barber of Seville (1816) GIOACCHINO ROSSINI (1792-1868)

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ossini was said to have based the original Overture to The Barber of Seville, appropriately enough, on Spanish themes. That piece, however, was lost in transit somewhere between Rome and Bologna, so he simply replaced it with the instrumental number he had composed for Elisabetta in Naples the year before, which in its turn had been adapted from the Overture to Aureliano in Palmira of 1813, an adventure of the Emperor Aurelian in Palmyra in the third century of the Christian era.” Whether comedic or serious, this sparkling Overture is the perfect embodiment of Rossini’s unaffected artistic philosophy: “Delight must be the basis and aim of this art. Simple melody — clear rhythm.”

Woodwind Quintet in D major, Op. 124 (1875) GIULIO BRICCIALDI (1818-1881)

Giulio Briccialdi, born in 1818 in Terni, about fifty miles north of Rome, was introduced to music by his father, a flutist and composer, but the elder Briccialdi’s death when the boy was twelve and the family’s subsequent insistence that he enter the priesthood forced Giulio to flee to Rome, where he perfected his playing sufficiently to win a position as flutist in a theater orchestra. He also studied composition with a singer from the Vatican choir named Ravagli, and had so perfected his musical skills by age fifteen that he was admitted to membership in the respected Accademia di Santa Cecilia. He moved to Naples in 1836 and the following year became flute teacher to the Count of Syracuse, brother of Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies. During the 1840s, Briccialdi was based in London, touring widely in Europe and America and working with the instrument maker Rudall & Rose to extend the 52

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range of the flute. Briccialdi continued refining his instruments after he was appointed flute professor at the Istituto Musicale in Florence in 1870, setting up a workshop there to build instruments to his own patent. After Briccialdi’s death, in Florence on December 17, 1881, the conservatory in his hometown was designated as the Istituto Musicale Terni “Giulio Briccialdi.”

Briccialdi’s Woodwind Quintet in D major (Op. 124), published in 1875, summarizes the two essential aspects of his musical personality: the mastery of woodwind sonority and technique and the apparently irresistible attraction of opera for 19th-century Italian composers. The first movement (Allegro marziale [march-like]) is a two-part medley of attractive themes. (The second section begins with a clarinet strain reminiscent of an elaborate tenor aria.) The Andante is built around a long, elegant melody played first by oboe and later by flute, with expressive contrast and formal balance provided by the more animated central episode that separates them.

The virtuosic finale, which would not be out of place in a rollicking opera buffa, pauses before its coda to recall the elegant melody of the second movement.

String Quartet in E minor (1873) GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813-1901)

Why such an anomalous work as a String Quartet from Italy’s leading opera composer, and why in 1873? Following the composition and attendant difficulties of mounting Aida, his 26th opera, Verdi, at age 58, had sworn not to write again for the stage, a vow he kept — except for composing the Requiem in honor of Alessandro Manzoni in 1874 and revising Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlos during the early 1880s — until the poet Arrigo Boito and his publisher Giulio Ricordi convinced him to undertake Otello a decade later. Stuck in his Naples hotel room in March 1873, Verdi, for the first time in his working life, had no project at

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hand into which he could channel his creativity, so he turned to the string quartet, a genre he had studied and long admired but never practiced. Four musicians from the San Carlo orchestra played the Quartet privately for a few of the composer’s friends at the Hotel della Crocelle on April 1st, the day after Aida finally opened, but then Verdi filed the piece away, refusing public performances and withholding its publication. Despite insistent requests from chamber musicians and concert organizations, he did not allow the Quartet to be heard again until it was given before an invited audience at the Hôtel de Bade in Paris on June 1, 1876, when he was in that city to supervise the local premiere of Aida. The success of that performance convinced him to publish the work, and it was soon heard publicly in Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere, and has remained a staple of the chamber literature.

The Quartet’s opening Allegro takes as its main theme a melody of quiet urgency that has been likened to dramatic moments in Aida and La Forza del Destino. The subsidiary subject is a sweet, falling strain in a brighter key; a playful, staccato passage and some vigorous unison gestures close the exposition. The development section is concerned with the main theme to such a degree that it is omitted from the formal recapitulation, which begins instead with the sweet second theme. The Andantino, despite brief episodes of heightened intensity, is elegant and sentimental, with a principal theme reminiscent of a gentle waltz.

The third movement uses a whirling Gypsy dance to surround the wordless cello aria with a plucked accompaniment that occupies its central section. Verdi called the finale a “Scherzo Fuga” — a “jesting fugue” — and he recalled its feather-stitched textures, rhythmic exuberance and joyous close when he composed the final scene of his career twenty years later, the brilliant fugue that summarizes the moral of his Falstaff: Tutto nel mondo è burla — “The whole world is but a jest.”

BEAVER CREEK INTERFAITH CHAPEL

QWINDA WOODWIND QUINTET

Niles Watson, flute William Welter, oboe Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet Emeline Chong, bassoon Jenny Ney, horn

ROSSINI Overture to The Barber of Seville for Woodwind Quintet BRICCIALDI Woodwind Quintet in D major, Op. 124 Allegro marziale Andante — Allegretto Allegro VERDI String Quartet in E minor arranged for Woodwind Quintet Allegro Andantino Prestissimo Scherzo Fuga: Allegro assai mosso

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INUKSUIT Inuksuit (2009) JOHN LUTHER ADAMS (B. 1953)

“M

y music has always been profoundly influenced by the natural world and a strong sense of place,” says John Luther Adams of the expressive core of his creativity. “Through sustained listening to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape, I hope to explore the territory of sonic geography — that region between place and culture...between environment and imagination.” The citation he received accompanying the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University in 2010 praised him “for melding the physical and musical worlds into a unique artistic vision that transcends stylistic boundaries.”

Adams was born in 1953 in Meridian, Mississippi and raised in the South and in the New York suburbs, but he has spent much of his life in Alaska, where he worked in a oneroom cabin-studio outside Fairbanks. After he began having trouble with his eyesight in 2014 and was also increasingly depressed by what he realized, he said, is “the accelerating reality of climate change in Alaska,” he moved to New York City, though he continues to assert that Alaska is “the landscape of my soul.” Adams started playing piano, trumpet and drums and writing songs in his teens, and became interested in contemporary classical music through the later compositions of Frank Zappa. He studied composition with James Tenney at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was in the first graduating class in 1973 and began working for environmental protection; he traveled to Alaska two years later to campaign for passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act and made it his home for the next four decades.

In addition to composing, Adams has held residencies with the Anchorage Symphony, Anchorage Opera, Fairbanks Symphony, Arctic Chamber Orchestra and Alaska Public Radio

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Network, served as timpanist and percussionist of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and Arctic Chamber Orchestra, and taught at the University of Alaska; his additional faculty appointments have included Bennington College, the Oberlin Conservatory and Harvard University. Adams has also served as Executive Director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center and authored two books and numerous other writings on music and the environment.

The work of John Luther Adams has received rapidly growing acclaim in recent years — in 2014, Alex Ross, the highly respected music critic of The New Yorker, praised him as “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century” and he received both that year’s Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for orchestral work Become Ocean (which Ross called “the loveliest apocalypse in musical history”). In addition to the Nemmers Prize, Adams has also received the William Schuman Award from Columbia University, Heinz Award, and grants, awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Rasmuson Foundation, Alaska State Council on the Arts, American Music Center, Meet the Composer, Opera America and Foundation for Contemporary Arts; in 2006, he was named one of the first United States Artists Fellows.

In explaining the genesis of Inuksuit of 2009, Adams wrote, “Recently, after hearing my Strange and Sacred Noise performed in the Anza-Borrego desert of southern California, the New England woods and the tundra of the Alaska Range, I wanted to create a large-scale work conceived specifically to be performed outside. In the concert hall, we shut out the outside world and concentrate our listening on a few carefully chosen sounds. Outdoors, we’re challenged to expand our awareness to encompass a multiplicity of sounds — receiving messages not only from the composer and the performers, but also from the larger world around us. Moving outdoors meant that a

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06 SATURDAY AUGUST 6, 2:00PM SPECIAL EVENT

MALOIT PARK, MINTURN

COLORADO INUKSUIT ENSEMBLE Featuring 66 percussionists from Colorado and beyond, including the Meehan/ Perkins Duo, musicians of the Aspen Music Festival, the University of Northern Colorado, Denver University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado State University, the Colorado Symphony, and more.

Doug Perkins, music director Brandon Bell, project coordinator J. L. ADAMS Inuksuit Running time of this performance will be approximately 70 minutes.

INUKSUIT IS A CO-PRODUCTION BETWEEN BRAVO! VAIL AND THE ASPEN MUSIC FESTIVAL AND SCHOOL.

© EMORY HENSLEY

whole different set of sounds is required, a different sense of sound and space, a different level of awareness. Each performance of Inuksuit is different, determined by the size of the ensemble and the specific instruments used, by the topology and vegetation of the site — even by the songs of the local birds.

The musicians in Inuksuit are dispersed widely throughout a large area. The listeners are free to move around and discover their own individual listening points, actively shaping their experience.

“Inuksuit — translated literally, the word means ‘to act in the capacity of the human’ — was inspired by the large, human-shaped cairns of stone constructed by the Inuit over the centuries as waypoints to orient themselves in the trackless, windswept expanse of the Arctic.

To me, those figures on the Arctic coastal plain are haunting symbols of human vulnerability and exposure, and one can imagine as the polar ice melts and the seas rise and maybe we come to the end of our days as a species that those figures standing there may be some of the last traces of human beings. In a sense, this work is haunted by the possibility that, as human animals, we’re staring our own extinction in the face.

“In Inuksuit, I imagined each musician and each listener as a solitary figure in a vast, open landscape. What I wasn’t prepared for was the strong sense of community the piece seems to create.”

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

© CHRISTIAN STEINER

Aeolus Quartet (string quartet), comprised of violinists Nicholas Tavani and Rachel Shapiro, violist Gregory Luce, and cellist Alan Richardson, was formed in 2008 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Since its inception, the all-American quartet has won awards at major competitions including Grand Prize at the 2011 Plowman Chamber Music Competition and 2011 Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition. The Quartet has performed across North America, Europe, and Asia in venues including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, The Library of Congress, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center.

© MARK KITAOKA

Lucas Aleman (violin) joined the Dallas Symphony

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Orchestra’s first violin section in 2006 following his tenure as concertmaster of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1998, he was appointed concertmaster of the Real Filharmonia de Galicia at age 22, making him, at the time, the youngest concertmaster in Spain. Aleman has appeared as soloist with the Castilla y Leon Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfonica de Las Palmas and the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra. He is a passionate chamber musician, and has appeared in numerous festivals including the Gergiev Festival and Musica por Doquier in New York City.

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© ROGER BERG

Ryan Anthony (trumpet) started his solo career as a 16-year-old winner of the highly publicized Seventeen Magazine/General Motors Concerto Competition, and is now noted for his varied career as soloist, educator, chamber musician and orchestral player. A member of the world-renowned ensemble Canadian Brass from 2000 to 2003, Mr. Anthony is currently Principal Trumpet with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and has also appeared as principal trumpet for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Symphony and played in the sections of New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra and Israel Philharmonic.

© MARK KITAOKA

Ann Marie Brink (viola), Associate Principal Viola of the Dallas Symphony since 1999, has performed in solo and chamber music recitals at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Library of Congress, Sarasota Music Festival, Severance Hall, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Merkin Concert Hall, and the Dallas Museum of Art. First introduced to the viola in a public school strings class, Ms. Brink became one of the youngest members of the Pensacola Symphony, performing in the viola section while just a freshman in high school.

© JESSICA GRIFFIN

Che-Hung Chen (viola) has been a member of The Philadelphia Orchestra since 2001, becoming the first Taiwanese citizen ever to join the Orchestra. An avid chamber musician, Chen performed on the Music from Marlboro 50th anniversary concerts in Boston and New York’s Carnegie Hall, and has participated in festivals such as Ravinia, Caramoor, Saratoga, Bridgehampton, and Music from Angel Fire. A three-time top-prize winner at the Taiwan National Instrumental Competition, Chen was the first-prize winner at the Seventh Banff International String Quartet Competition as a founding member of the Daedalus Quartet.

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Hannah Choi (violin) joined the New York Philharmonic after serving in Chicago’s Grant Park Festival Orchestra and as a substitute in The Philadelphia Orchestra. She appeared as concertmaster with the Haffner Symphony, Tanglewood Festival, and Pacific Music Festival orchestras. She has performed as soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra (as winner of the Albert M. Greenfield Competition) and New England Conservatory Philharmonia (New England Conservatory Concerto Competition); Seoul, Daejeon, and Poland National philharmonic orchestras; and Atlantic, Korean, and Haffner symphony orchestras. Ms. Choi has performed recitals in South Korea, the United States, and abroad.

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© CHRIS LEE

Timothy Cobb (bass) joined the New York

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Philharmonic as Principal Bass in 2014, after serving as principal bass of The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and principal bass of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.

A UNESCO Artist for Peace and principal bass of Valery Gergiev’s World Orchestra for Peace, he has toured with the Musicians from Marlboro series and has an ongoing collaboration with actor Stephen Lang. Mr. Cobb serves as chair of the bass department of The Juilliard School and is on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, Purchase College, Rutgers University, and Sarasota Music Festival.

Dover Quartet (string quartet), in 2013, became the first-ever Quartet-in-Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music, and this season joined Northwestern University as Faculty Quartet-in-Residence. The Quartet’s 2015-16 season featured more than 100 concerts around the world, including debuts at Carnegie Hall, the Lucerne Festival, and Yale University, and on Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series; their debut tour of Israel; and four concerts at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., two of them featuring a new work written for the Quartet by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.

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© CHRIS LEE

Pascual Martínez Forteza (clarinet) joined the New York Philharmonic after serving in the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Born in Spain, he has performed as guest principal clarinet with the Berlin Philharmonic and appears as a soloist, recitalist, and master class teacher worldwide, including at the International Clarinet Festival of Chanchung (China) and The Juilliard School.

He and pianist Gema Nieto perform internationally as Duo Forteza-Nieto, and he founded the wind ensemble Vent Cameristic. A faculty member at NYU, he teaches orchestral repertoire at Manhattan School of Music and is a Buffet Crampon Artist and Vandoren Artist.

© CHRIS LEE

Quan Ge (violin) — a native of Huai Nan, China, and a member of the New York Philharmonic — was the recipient of a Fu Chen Xian Scholarship, and has won top prizes in both the China National Competition and the Jeunesses Music Competition (Romania). She studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, while also serving as a substitute with The Philadelphia Orchestra, and The Juilliard School. Ms. Ge is an active chamber musician and recitalist, and most recently worked with pianist Robert McDonald and the Borromeo String Quartet at the Taos School of Music in 2008.

© JIYANG CHEN

Tomer Gewirtzman (piano fellow) was born in Israel and is currently working toward his Master of Music degree at The Juilliard School under Sergei Babayan.

He has been awarded dozens of awards and accolades including First Prizes in the 2015 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, the 2014 Wideman International Piano Competition, and the Chopin Competition for Young Pianists in Tel-Aviv. Mr. Gewirtzman has performed recitals in London and Paris, played with Nikolai Petrov’s Kremlin Festival throughout Russia, and has appeared as soloist with orchestras throughout Israel and the United States.

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© LUCA VALENTA

Augustin Hadelich (violin) won a 2016 Grammy in the “Best Classical Instrumental Solo” just months after being awarded the inaugural Warner Music Prize.

Highlights of his 2015-16 season included debuts with the Chicago Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, as well as return engagements with numerous renowned ensembles worldwide. The 2006 Gold Medalist of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, Mr. Hadelich is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant (2009), a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in the UK (2011), and Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award (2012).

© MARK KITAOKA

Theodore Harvey (cello) Associate Principal Cello with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, has performed as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestra member throughout North America, South America and Europe, including serving as assistant principal cellist of the Charlotte Symphony from 2004 to 2008. He has been a soloist with the New World Symphony, the (Bloomington, Ind.) Camerata Orchestra and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. During the summer of 2013 he toured Brazil with the Baroque ensemble Fantasmi, and later that year taught at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul.

© MARCO BORGGREVE

Chad Hoopes (violin) has been garnering international

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attention since he won first prize at the Young Artists Division of the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition, and his 2014 admittance into the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s renowned CMS Two Program. 2015-16 season highlights included return invitations to the Louvre in Paris, Rheingau Musik Festival, Kloster Eberbach, Moritzburg, and Mosel Music Festival as well as his London debut with the National Youth Orchestra and a highly acclaimed debut with the Munich Symphony Orchestra, which led to an invitation to be their first Artist in Residence.

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

© MARK KITAOKA

Jennifer Humphreys (violin) joined the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Previously, she was a member of the Atlanta Symphony and Assistant Principal of the Charlotte Symphony. She has performed with many orchestras around the country including the Baltimore, Houston, Charleston and Huntsville (AL) Symphonies, The Florida Orchestra, and the Colorado Music Festival; has served as principal cellist of the National Repertory Orchestra and the National Orchestral Institute; and participated in the American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. Humphreys also performs with the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and is a founding member of the Peachtree String Quartet.

© JESSICA GRIFFIN

Elina Kalendarova (violin), a native of Tashkent (USSR), joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2002, and had previously played with the American Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, and the Pittsburgh Symphony. She has performed as a soloist with the Liederkrantz Symphony Orchestra in New York and appeared as a recitalist for the Ascending Artists series. In 1996, Kalendarova was a recipient of the MetLife Music and Visual Arts Award presented through the New York Association for New Americans. She is a founding member of the Society Hill String Quintet, comprised of members of The Philadelphia Orchestra.

© MARK KITAOKA

Eunice Keem (violin) joined the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 2011, and was named Associate Concertmaster in 2014. As a chamber musician, Ms. Keem is a two-time first place winner of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, first as a member of the Fine Arts Trio, then several years later with the Orion Piano Trio.

She has received first and top prizes at the Irving M. Klein International Competition, Schadt International Competition, Corpus Christi International Competition, Kingsville International Competition, as well as a Paganini Prize at the 7th International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, among others.

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© JESSICA GRIFFIN

Yumi Kendall (cello) joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2004 as Assistant Principal Cello upon graduation from the Curtis Institute of Music. As a founding member of the Dryden String Quartet, formed with her brother, violinist Nick Kendall of Time for Three; their cousin, National Symphony Principal Viola Daniel Foster; and National Symphony Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef, Ms. Kendall has performed on the Kennedy Center’s Fortas Chamber series, the Reading Chamber Music Series, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Music at Penn Alps, and the Schneider Concert Series at the New School in New York.

© CHELSEA SANDERS

Alexander Kerr (violin), Concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra since 2011, is also Principal Guest Concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and Professor of Violin at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He is a founder of the Starling Chamber Players, a showcase for the wealth of talent at the Jacobs School. Mr. Kerr has appeared as soloist with major orchestras around the world, and is an active chamber musician whose collaborators have included Martha Argerich, Joshua Bell, Yefim Bronfman, Edgar Meyer, and Maxim Vengerov, among others.

© RYAN DONNELL

David Kim (violin) appears as soloist with The

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Philadelphia Orchestra — where he has been Concertmaster since 1999 — each season, as well as with numerous orchestras, in recital, and at such festivals as Grand Teton, Brevard, MasterWorks (US), and Pacific (Japan). Highlights of Mr. Kim’s 2015-16 season included teaching/performance residencies at Oberlin College, Bob Jones University, and the Boston Conservatory; continued appearances as concertmaster of the All-Star Orchestra on PBS and online at the Kahn Academy; and the launch of the first annual David Kim Orchestral Institute of Cairn University in Philadelphia.

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

© SHAO TING KUEI

Steven Lin (piano fellow) was accepted into the Juilliard Pre-College Division on a full scholarship at the age of ten to study with Yoheved Kaplinsky. A two-time winner of the Juilliard Pre-College Piano Competition, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in Avery Fisher Hall at the age of 13. Additional concerto performances include the New Jersey Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Tulsa Symphony, Orlando Philharmonic and Sendai Symphony Orchestra. He has appeared on radio broadcasts including NPR’s From The Top and WQXR’s McGraw Hill Young Artists Showcase.

Anne-Marie McDermott (piano), Bravo! Vail’s Artistic Director since 2011, has played concertos, recitals and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the United States, Europe and Asia over her 25-year career. An artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she is a regular performer at top chamber music festivals worldwide and has performed with many leading orchestras. Ms. McDermott has recorded the complete Prokofiev piano sonatas, Bach’s English Suites and Partitas (Editor’s Choice, Gramophone magazine), Gershwin’s works for piano and orchestra, and a disc of Mozart concertos with the Calder Quartet.

© BEN JOHANSEN

Meehan/Perkins Duo (percussion duo) was founded in 2006 by Todd Meehan and Doug Perkins with the goal of expanding repertoire and producing eclectic new acoustic and electro-acoustic works. Their diverse commissions and engaging performances have been shared with audiences throughout the country, including at Weill Recital Hall, MoMA, the Bang on a Can Marathon, (le) poisson rouge, the Ojai Music Festival, and abroad in Russia, Brazil, and Mexico. Their recording of Parallels, a high-frequency full-length piece written for the Duo by composer/visual artist Tristan Perich, was released in 2015.

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Jennifer Montone (horn) joined The Philadelphia Orchestra as Principal Horn in 2006, and that same year was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant.

She is on the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music, The Juilliard School, and Temple University, and as a chamber musician has performed with Bay Chamber Concerts, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, among others. Her recording of the Penderecki Horn Concerto (“Winterreise”) with the Warsaw National Philharmonic won a 2013 Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Compendium.

© CHRIS LEE

Eileen Moon (cello) joined the New York Philharmonic in 1998, and in 2007 was named Associate Principal Cello, The Paul and Diane Guenther Chair. She was a top prize winner in YoungArts (Florida) in 1987, Irving Klein (California) in 1988, Geneva International Competition (Switzerland) in 1991, and Tchaikovsky International Competition (Moscow) in 1994. She has performed in prestigious festivals, and is the founder of the Warwick Music Series in Warwick, New York. She co-founded Friends of Warwick Valley Humane Society and aims to open a sanctuary for injured, abandoned, and “retired” animals and wildlife.

© CHRIS LEE

Philip Myers (horn) joined the New York Philharmonic

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as Principal Horn, The Ruth F. and Alan J. Broder Chair, in January 1980, and made his solo debut with the Orchestra that month in the premiere of William Schuman’s Three Colloquies for French Horn and Orchestra. He has since appeared as a Philharmonic soloist often in repertoire including Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Britten. Mr. Myers previously served as principal horn of the Atlantic Symphony, third horn with the Pittsburgh Symphony, and principal horn of the Minnesota Orchestra. He plays Engelbert Schmid French horns.

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

© RYAN DONNELL

Hai-Ye Ni (cello) joined The Philadelphia Orchestra as Principal Cello in 2006 after having served as associate principal cello of the New York Philharmonic since 1999. A sought-after soloist and chamber musician, she has performed around the world with such symphony orchestras as Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver, Singapore, the Orchestre National de Paris, and Hong Kong Philharmonic. Recipient of a 2001 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Ms. Ni made her critically praised New York debut in 1991, a result of her winning first prize at the Naumburg International Cello Competition.

© MARK KITAOKA

Nathan Olson (violin) is Co-Concertmaster with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Concertmaster of the Breckenridge Music Festival. He is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music’s prestigious Concertmaster Academy, where he studied with William Preucil and Paul Kantor. As a member of the Baumer String Quartet, Mr. Olson is on faculty with the Monterey Chamber Music Workshop and the Crowden Chamber Music Workshop. An enthusiastic chamber musician, he has served on faculty at the Innsbrook Music Festival and won the silver medal at the 2005 Fischoff International Chamber Music Competition.

© WILLIAM WEGMAN

Opus One (piano quartet) brings together four of the leading musicians of our time: pianist AnneMarie McDermott, violinist Ida Kavafian, violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Peter Wiley. Veterans as well as present members of the world’s most prestigious chamber groups including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Tashi, the Beaux Arts Trio and the Orion and Guarneri String Quartets, the ensemble has performed on major series, as well as at universities and festivals across the U.S. Opus One has commissioned and premiered works by such composers as Stephen Hartke, Lowell Liebermann, and Steven Stucky.

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© EDY PEREZ

Christopher O’Riley (piano) is known to millions as the host of NPR’s “From the Top,” each week introducing the next generation of classical-music stars to listeners around the country. He has performed as a soloist with most major American orchestras and in recital throughout North America, Europe, and Australia, garnering widespread praise for his untiring efforts to reach new audiences with repertoire that spans a kaleidoscopic array of music from the pre-baroque to present-day. Mr. O’Riley has received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and an equally coveted four-star review from Rolling Stone magazine.

© CHRIS LEE

Rémi Pelletier (viola) joined the New York Philharmonic after serving in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He also served as guest principal viola of the International Orchestra of Italy, principal viola of Japan’s Pacific Music Festival, and assistant principal of the New York String Orchestra Seminar, and was a regular substitute with The Philadelphia Orchestra. He has performed chamber music at the Société de musique de chamber de Québec, Rendez-vous musical de Laterrière and Musica Camerata, and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s chamber music series. His honors include the CBC/ McGill Music Award and first prizes at the Concours du Québec and Canada’s National Music Festival Competition.

© MARK KITAOKA

Brian Perry (bass) is the newest member of the

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Dallas Symphony Orchestra bass section. Prior to his appointment, he was a member of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra since 2004. He has performed as a guest artist with the Cleveland Orchestra and regularly with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.

Perry is a frequent guest artist for the Van Cliburn Foundation’s Musical Awakenings Educational Concert Series and performs on the Spectrum Chamber Music series, with the Caminos del Inka Ensemble, and as a member of the Funkytown All-Stars, an all double-bass quartet based in Fort Worth.

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

© ANDREW BOGARD

Qwinda (woodwind quintet) was formed in 2015 after a group of students from the Curtis Institute of Music were invited to the festival Music from Angel Fire as a quintet-in-residence, where they worked with renowned chamber musicians such as Ida and Ani Kavafian, AnneMarie McDermott, Peter Wiley, musicians from the Miami and Orion Quartets, Stephen Taylor, Tara O’Connor, and others. Three of the founding members (Niles Watson, flute; William Welter, oboe; Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet) as well as the newest group member, bassoonist Emeline Chong, will be joined by Jenny Ney (horn) for their Bravo! Vail programs.

© SALLY BROWN

Dr. Richard E. Rodda (program annotator) has provided program notes for numerous American orchestras, as well as the Kennedy Center, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Grant Park Music Festival (Chicago), the Cleveland Octet, the Peninsula Music Festival, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest and many other ensembles and organizations across the country. He is a regular contributor to Stagebill Magazine, and has written liner notes for Telarc, Angel, Newport Classics, Delos and Dorian Records. Dr. Rodda also teaches at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music.

© MARK KITAOKA

Nora Scheller (violin) began her orchestral career in high school, substituting in professional orchestras from the age of 15. She attended the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she studied with Dallas Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Alexander Kerr. At 19, she was the youngest pupil since Joshua Bell to be accepted into the University’s prestigious Artist Diploma Program.

Scheller has participated as a Fellow in the Verbier and Aspen festivals, and has performed in chamber music series across the U.S. as a member of the IU Starling Chamber Players.

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© MARK KITAOKA

David Sywak (viola) has been a member of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra since 1996. Prior to coming to Dallas, he was a member of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. With the Dallas Symphony, he travels regularly to Colorado, and to cities such as Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, Edinburgh and London. An active chamber musician, Sywak has collaborated with Voices of Change contemporary music group, and performed at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture center. He is a regular coach for the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra, and has taught master classes in Dallas, Frisco and Allen public schools.

© JESSICA GRIFFIN

Burchard Tang (viola) joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1999, just months after receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Curtis Institute of Music. Tang has served as principal viola with the Curtis Symphony and the New York String Seminar, and performed with the Brandenburg Ensemble. A 1993 winner of The Philadelphia Orchestra Albert M. Greenfield Student Competition, he performed with the Orchestra as a soloist that same year. Other honors include the Temple University Preparatory Division Concerto Competition and second prize in the Senior Division of the Fischoff Competition in 1996.

© MARK KITAOKA

Lydia Umlauf (violin) is one of the youngest members

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of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Previous to joining the DSO, Umlauf was offered a position in the Louisville Symphony Orchestra as interim assistant concertmaster and had substituted with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra since 2013. She took part in the 2012 Salzburg Music Festival as part of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival orchestral academy, played chamber music and performed orchestra concerts in Carnegie Hall as part of the 2012 New York String Orchestra Seminar, and has won solo performances with the Lafayette and Muncie Symphony orchestras.

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

After-School Piano Program 2016-2017

Visit bravovail.org/piano for full details. Registration runs August 8-26.

WHO: Students grades 1-8.

WHAT: Introduce fundamental musical concepts and build basic keyboard skills, including music reading.

WHEN: Classes run September 12 - May 12 during after school hours in 45 minute sessions between 4pm-7pm, depending on location.

WHERE: Various locations throughout the Valley, check bravovail.org/piano for details.

COST: $125 for a total of 30 weekly classes (scholarships available for those needing assistance)

Hands-on, engaging, and energizing, the piano program teachings go far beyond playing music—learning music at a young age can promote creativity, build self-esteem, and improve academic performance!

SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: Alpine Bank • National Endowment for the Arts • Town of Gypsum US Bancorp Foundation • Wall Street Insurance BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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THANK YOU B

ravo! Vail extends its sincere gratitude and appreciation to everyone who has supported the vast array of Education and Community Engagement Programs the Festival offers.

Their support allows Bravo! to accomplish its mission, to enrich peoples’ lives through the power of music.

Letitia and Christopher Aitken

Cookie and Jim Flaum

Alpine Bank

The Francis Family

Sarah and Glenn Ast

The Sidney E. Frank Foundation

Dierdre and Ronnie Baker

Greer and John Gardner

Beaver Creek Resort Company

Andrea and Mike Glass

Jayne and Paul Becker

Sue and Dan Godec

Alix and Hans Berglund

Lisa Green and Martin Waldbaum

Kelly and Sam Bronfman II

Terri and Tom Grojean

Janie and Bill Burns

Anne and Harry Gutman

Barbara and Paul Cantrell

Kathryn and Michael Hanley

Mary Ellen and Stan Cope Amy and Steve Coyer

Valerie and Noel Harris/Wall Street Insurance

Elizabeth Davis and Peter Cobos

Becky Hernreich

Arlene and John Dayton

Kathy and Allan Hubbard

Kathy and Brian Doyle

Julie and Steven Johannes

Sandi and Leo Dunn

Judy and Alan Kosloff

Eagle County

Sheila and Aaron Leibovic

Eagle Ranch Homeowners Association

Karen and Walter Loewenstern

Peggy and Gary Edwards

Donna and Patrick Martin

Sallie and Robert Fawcett

Barbie and Tony Mayer

Kathy and David Ferguson

Carolyn and Gene Mercy

FirstBank

Barb and Duane Miller

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Jane and Richard Mirande

Marcy and Gerry Spector

Lisa Muncy-Pietrzak and Mik Pietrzak

Cathy and Howard Stone

Caitlin and Dan Murray

Susan and Steven Suggs

National Endowment for the Arts

Dhuanne and Doug Tansill

Rickie and Gordon Nutik

Anna and Bill Tenenblatt

Jean and Ray Oglethorpe

Joe Tonahill, Jr.

The Paiko Trust, in honor of the Firefighters of the Vail Valley

Town of Eagle

Linda and Kalmon Post

Debbie and Fred Tresca

Patti and Drew Rader

United Way of Eagle River Valley

Kymberly and Joe Redmond

US Bancorp Foundation

Amy and James Regan

Norm and Jackie Waite

Susan and Rich Rogel

Sandra and Greg Walton

Elaine and Steven Schwartzreich

Carole A. Watters

Sue and Doug Sewell

Jeanne and Craig White

Connie and William Smith

Gina and Andre Willner

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pecial thanks to the many donors and partners who make the Bravo! Vail Chamber Series possible.

The Festival is so grateful for their generosity, which brings this beautiful set of concerts to life.

Amy and Charlie Allen

Lifthouse Condominiums

Big Delicious Catering

Lion Square Lodge

The Christie Lodge Destination Resorts

The Paiko Trust, in honor of the Firefighters of the Vail Valley

Evergreen Lodge

Sebastian Vail

FOODsmith

Second Nature Gourmet

Fork Art Catering

Sitzmark Lodge

Four Seasons Resort Vail

Sonnenalp

The Francis Family

Town of Vail

The Sidney E. Frank Foundation

Vail Marriott Mountain Resort and Spa

Grgich Hills Estate

Vail Mountain Lodge and Spa

The Judy and Alan Kosloff Artistic Director Chair

Vail’s Mountain Haus

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FREE SPECIAL EVENT

LET’S GET

INUKSUIT | SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2:00PM 72

2016 CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAMS

LOST Into the woods with 66 percussionists

One of the most rapturous experiences of my listening life. — Alex Ross, The New Yorker

MALOIT PARK, MINTURN BRAVOVAIL.ORG

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