Voices of the Soul featuring Fred Child

Monday, July 24

Kaul Auditorium | 8pm

Sponsor: Anonymous Friends of CMNW

ALEXANDER SCRIABIN (1872-1915) WANG JIE (b. 1980)

Piano Sonata No. 3 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 23 • (20’)

I. Drammàtico

II. Allegretto

III. Andante

IV. Presto con fuoco

Blame the Obituary • (15-20’)

CMNW CO-COMMISSION - WORLD PREMIERE

Intermission

KOMITAS VARDAPET (1869-1935) RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)

Three Armenian Folk Songs for Violin & Piano • (10’)

I. Chinar es

II. Qeler, Tsoler

III. Krunk

Sonata for Violin & Piano • (28’)

I. Allegro, ma non troppo

II. Improvisation: Andante cantabile

III. Andante: Allegro

Zitong Wang, piano

Fred Child, narrator

Third Sound

Laura Cocks, flute

Bixby Kennedy, clarinet

Karen Kim, violin

Michael Nicolas, cello

Steven Beck, piano

Diana Adamyan, violin

Zitong Wang, piano

Wang Jie’s Blame the Obituary was co-commissioned by the Chamber Music Northwest Commissioning Club, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the La Jolla Music Society.

“

According to several contemporary accounts, Alexander Scriabin’s egotism knew no bounds. He esteemed his own music with as much arrogance as his neartotal contempt for almost every other composer’s work, Tchaikovsky, whose music, Scriabin claimed, “made him ill.” This dismissive attitude also applied to Scriabin’s assessment of his contemporaries, both within and outside Russia.

Unlike most of Scriabin’s sonatas, which feature a single movement, the Piano Sonata No. 3 in F-sharp minor, Op. 23 has four. Over time, Scriabin appended several titles to this sonata, including “Gothic” and, some years later, “États d’âme” (States of the Soul). Scriabin also provided a programmatic description of each of the four movements:

Drammàtico: The soul, free and wild, thrown into the whirlpool of suffering and strife.

Allegretto: Apparent momentary and illusory respite; tired from suffering the soul wants to forget, wants to sing and flourish, in spite of everything. But the light rhythm, the fragrant harmonies are just a cover through which gleams the restless and languishing soul.

Andante : A sea of feelings, tender and sorrowful; love, sorrow, vague desires, inexplicable thoughts, illusions of a delicate dream.

Presto con fuoco: From the depth of being rises the fearsome voice of creative man whose victorious song resounds triumphantly. But too weak yet to reach the acme he plunges, temporarily defeated, into the abyss of non-being.”

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

A 20-minute Kafka-esque piece for narrator and quintet: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Not a theater piece, but chamber music with a dash of theatrical flair. A musical picture of life during these trying last few years. At times whimsical and comical, at times devastatingly bleak, our narrator takes us on a journey into his lonely soul, writing his own obituary while engaging in lively conversation with the things around his small, bare living space. A virtuosic quintet plays Wang Jie's evocative music, while narrator Fred Child (host of America's most-listened-to classical music radio show, Performance Today) narrates with pathos and selfdeprecating humor. Creative conception and text by American screenwriter Charlie Peters ( 5 Flights Up, My One and Only). By the end, the audience will have memorable tunes and delicious harmonic passages in mind, and will have reflected on the meaning of their own loves, losses, and choices during these uniquely trying passages of life.

—© Wang Jie

The story of Armenian composer Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935) contains both inspiration and tragedy. An ordained priest, Komitas spent his early career collecting folk melodies in the Armenian countryside. He used what he learned to help foster a national musical culture in the Armenian diaspora by arranging, publishing, performing, and composing music based on traditional melodies. Like so many others, however, Komitas’s creative potential was cut short by the mental toll of the Armenian genocide (1915-17), and he spent his remaining years in a mental hospital outside of Paris.

Despite the questions of what might have been, Komitas left behind a diverse and exceptional musical output. The majority of his songs are arrangements of folk melodies that combine Armenian musical elements with the Western classical tradition, which Komitas studied extensively in Berlin. Together, they present a profoundly impactful portrait of Armenia’s folklore, its past, and the perseverance of its culture to the present.

—© Ethan Allred

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) made his name as a musical disruptor. Preferring free-flowing, narrative “tone poems” to traditional symphonies and sonatas, he helped transition German music from the formal rigidity that governed composers from Bach to Brahms to a more open-minded approach to structure. As he once proclaimed, “What was for Beethoven a ‘form’ absolutely in congruity with the highest, most glorious content, is now, after 60 years, used as a formula…”

Early in his career, however, Strauss did experiment with several traditional forms, including the string quartet, the piano sonata, the piano quartet, and, finally, his splendid Violin Sonata (1887). Only 23 years old at the time of the sonata’s composition, Strauss was already a skilled instrumentalist with a thorough understanding of both the violin and the piano. The sonata’s first movement combines Strauss’s already burgeoning sense of dramatic energy with his lyricism, both of which would come to the fore in his later operatic career. The Improvisation movement, indeed, is often described as a “song without words,” starkly emotive and free-flowing in its harmonic continuum. The Finale is especially well-crafted structurally, demonstrating how Strauss always paid close attention to structure despite his aversion to preexisting forms.

—© Ethan Allred

Tuesday, July 25

Lincoln Recital Hall | 12pm

SPOTLIGHT RECITAL: Viano Quartet

KIAN RAVAEI (b. 1999)

The Little Things (2023)

CMNW CO-COMMISSION - WORLD PREMIERE

I. I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose

II. High From the Earth I Heard a Bird

III. Two Butterflies Went Out at Noon

IV. A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

V. The Moon Was but a Chin of Gold

VI. A Spider Sewed at Night

VII. If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking

Viano Quartet

Lucy Wang, violin

Hao Zhou, violin

Aiden Kane, viola

Tate Zawadiuk, cello

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)

SMETANA (1824-1884)

String Quartet No. 3, Sz. 85 (1927) • (16')

I. Moderato

II. Allegro

III. Moderato

IV. Allegro molto

String Quartet No. 1 “From My Life” • (28')

I. Allegro vivo appassionato

II. Allegro moderato á la Polka

III. Largo sostenuto

IV. Vivace

All seven titles which comprise The Little Things come from Emily Dickinson, who never fails to direct our attention toward nature’s easily overlooked wonders. Movements II, III, IV, and VI evoke various animal life, while I and V portray the sun and moon respectively. The order of the movements suggests the cyclic journey of all living things from morning to night to a new morning. In the final movement, we hear the voice of Nature singing Dickinson’s famous lines:

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.

—© Kian Ravaei

When Béla Bartók wrote his String Quartet No. 3 in the fall of 1927, ten years had passed since he had finished another quartet. His previous quartet (No. 2) abounded with music influenced by his study of Eastern European folk songs. In the case of his third quartet, it has been suggested that a 1926 performance of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite inspired Bartók to put pen to paper. Whether that particular concert played a role or not, Bartók’s third quartet certainly echoes the expressionist, twelve-tone sounds of Berg and his circle.

Shortly after finishing the quartet, Bartók embarked on a ten-week tour of the United States, where, among other appearances, he debuted as a pianist with the New York Philharmonic. He also heard about a composition contest sponsored by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia. To Bartók’s surprise, his Third String Quartet went on to win the $6,000 prize—equivalent to roughly $100,000 in 2023 dollars. “You can hardly imagine the sensation this caused in Budapest,” he wrote to a friend. “Six thousand dollars! I told everybody, from the very outset, that it couldn’t be as much as that—but to no effect; it is by now common knowledge that I have won $6,000.” The Musical Fund Society were not alone in their admiration for Bartók’s Third Quartet; Theodor Adorno, for example, described it as “unquestionably the best of the Hungarian’s works to date.”

Although Bartók divided this extremely concentrated quartet (his shortest) into two parts, its structure more closely resembles a single movement with two primary thematic sections. The first section darts between sparse, interjecting melodic fragments, while the second oscillates between rapid-fire scales and sharp rhythmic outbursts. Bartók then revisits both sections, first recapitulating excerpts from the first, then evoking the second’s rancorous energy in a final coda.

A particular point of interest is Bartók’s use of extended techniques, or nontraditional ways of playing the instruments. Examples include glissandi (slides), sul ponticello (playing very close to the bridge), and col legno (playing with the wooden back side of the bow), each drawing new sounds from traditional instruments.

—© Ethan Allred

Bedřich Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 , subtitled “From My Life,” chronicles the composer’s grief over the loss of several family members, as well as his own failing health.

The turbulence of the Allegro vivo eloquently expresses both the tragedies of Smetana’s personal life and the heightened Romanticism of his youth. “The first movement depicts my youthful leanings towards art, the Romantic atmosphere, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define, also a kind of premonition of my future misfortune,” wrote Smetana. “The long, insistent note in the finale…is the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tones which, in 1874, came to herald my deafness.”

The energetic polka in the second movement “recalls the joyful days of my youth when I composed dance tunes and was known everywhere as a passionate lover of dancing,” Smetana wrote. The Largo embodies Smetana’s love for his first wife, Kateřina, and foreshadows her untimely death. In the Vivace, Smetana celebrates his Czech heritage, “the discovery that I could treat national elements in music and my joy in following this path.” Partway through, the sigh motif from the first movement returns, signaling, in Smetana’s words, “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 painful regret.”

—© Elizabeth Schwartz