David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
THE ART OF THE RECITAL
DAVID SHIFRIN AND GLORIA CHIEN Thursday Evening, January 21, 2016 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,516th Concert
2015-2016 Season
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 10th Floor New York, NY 10023 212-875-5788 www.ChamberMusicSociety.org
This concert is made possible, in part, by Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Florence Gould Foundation, and the Grand Marnier Foundation. The Chamber Music Society is deeply grateful to Board member Paul Gridley for his very generous gift of the Hamburg Steinway & Sons model “D� concert grand piano we are privileged to hear this evening.
THE ART OF THE RECITAL Thursday Evening, January 21, 2016 at 7:30
DAVID SHIFRIN, clarinet GLORIA CHIEN, piano FRANCIS POULENC Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1962) (1899-1963)
Allegro tristamente Romanza: Très calme Allegro con fuoco
CLAUDE DEBUSSY Two Pieces from Children’s Corner for (1862-1918) Clarinet and Piano (arr. David Schiff) (1906-08) The Little Shepherd Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum
DEBUSSY Première rapsodie for Clarinet and Piano (1909-10) —PAUSE, 10 minutes—
PAUL SCHOENFIELD Klezmer Sonatina No. 2 for Clarinet and (b. 1947) Piano (2014) BÉLA KOVÁCS Sholem-alekhem, rov Feidman! for (b. 1937) Clarinet and Piano (2004) —PAUSE, 10 minutes— LUIGI BASSI Concert Fantasia on Themes from (1833-1871) Verdi’s Rigoletto for Clarinet and Piano GIOACCHINO Introduction, Theme, and Variations for ROSSINI Clarinet and Piano (1792-1868) Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited. This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive
notes on the
PROGRAM
The chameleon qualities of the clarinet are what first attracted me and have sustained my love for the instrument throughout my life. I love the way a clarinet can sing or dance, whisper or wail, run, leap or slide! Many of the greatest composers have recognized these qualities and included the clarinet in some of their most compelling masterpieces. Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann come to mind. Tonight, however, I want to explore examples from other great sources of clarinet repertoire. Twentieth-century Paris became a source for great wind repertoire with Debussy and Poulenc among the most prominent exponents. Two pinnacles of French clarinet repertoire are undoubtedly the rapsodie that Debussy wrote for the graduating students of the Paris Conservatory and the sonata that Poulenc wrote for Benny Goodman half a century later. Klezmer music is based on an amalgam of Eastern European folk and dance music and religious music from the synagogue. It has evolved into an enormously engaging and popular crossover genre than can almost be thought of as Jewish “soul music” which frequently casts the clarinet as protagonist. Composers Paul Schoenfield and Béla Kovács have contributed delightful additions to the recital repertoire in this idiom. Nineteenth-century Italian masters of opera such as Rossini and Verdi inspired an entire repertoire of virtuoso instrumental paraphrases, fantasies, and variations based on themes from the popular operas of the day. These compositions gave instrumentalists opportunities to shine while providing audiences a chance to hear music from their favorite operas. I was delighted when Gloria Chien agreed to collaborate on this project. Beyond her virtuosity, she has an uncanny sense of ensemble and flexibility that makes a diverse program like this especially enjoyable. I hope you will have as much fun listening as we will have playing! -David Shifrin
Sonata for Clarinet and Piano Francis POULENC Born January 7, 1899 in Paris. Died there on January 30, 1963. Composed in 1962. Premiered on April 10, 1963 in New York by Benny Goodman. First CMS performance on November 21, 1971. Duration: 14 minutes Of Poulenc’s 13 chamber works for various instrumental combinations, only three are exclusively for strings. The Clarinet Sonata, Poulenc’s last work except for the Sonata for Oboe and Piano, was composed in the summer of 1962 for Benny Goodman and dedicated to the memory of Arthur Honegger; Goodman and Leonard Bernstein gave the premiere in New York on April 10, 1963, ten weeks after the composer’s death from a heart attack in Paris on January 30th. Keith W. Daniel noted that this composition
and the sonatas for flute (1957) and oboe (1962) “may be compared with Debussy’s late sonatas in their mastery of form and medium, their reticence, and their easy flow of melody. Indeed, the three wind sonatas rank among Poulenc’s most profound, accomplished works: they retain the early tunefulness, but the impertinent edge is replaced by serenity and self-confidence, deepened by the addition of a religious undertone.” Rather than the sonata structure often heard in the first movement of such works, the Clarinet Sonata opens with a three-part form in which a central section, at once benedictory and slightly exotic, is surrounded by a beginning and ending paragraph in quicker tempo. The second movement, marked “very sweetly and with melancholy,” is almost hymnal in its lyricism and quiet intensity. The finale is based on the progeny of a French music hall tune that is treated, as Stravinsky did with the themes he stole (Stravinsky’s word) from Pergolesi for Pulcinella, with good humor and sympathy rather than with parody.
Two Pieces from Children’s Corner for Clarinet and Piano Claude DEBUSSY Born August 2, 1862 in St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. Died March 25, 1918 in Paris. Arranged by David Schiff. Composed in 1906-08. Premiered on December 18, 1908 in Paris by Harold Bauer. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 5 minutes
The greatest joy of Debussy’s life was his infant daughter, Claude-Emma, affectionately called “Chouchou,” who was born in October 1904. The composer’s friend and first biographer Louis Laloy recorded that Chouchou was “the fulfillment of one of his most cherished hopes.” Debussy moved his expanded family into a new apartment in the Avenue de Bois de Boulogne (now the Avenue Foch) so that Chouchou could have her own nursery, which he filled with toys and dolls. He confided to his publisher. Durand, that he could
“extract confidences from some of Chouchou’s dolls. The soul of a doll is more mysterious than even Maeterlinck imagines. It does not really tolerate the kind of clap-trap so many human souls put up with.” Inspired equally by his affection for Chouchou and by his musings about her anthropomorphic toys, he wrote the charmingly piquant Serenade for the Doll in 1906, intending to publish it in a piano method then being assembled by Octavie CarrierBelleuse, a fellow student at the conservatoire who had established her own teaching studio. Publication of Carrier-Belleuse’s Méthode moderne de piano was delayed until 1910, however, so Debussy issued the Serenade separately in 1906. Two years later, he added to it five movements grown from his adult’s view of childhood’s delights to create the “Little Suite for Piano,” Children’s Corner. (The work’s English titles were occasioned by both Debussy’s anglophilia and the English governess, one Miss Gibbs recently arrived from London, into whose charge Chouchou had been
placed.) The dedication of Durand’s first edition, issued in September 1908, read: “To my dear little Chouchou, with her father’s affectionate apologies for what follows.” In 1913, Debussy paid his second, and final, musical tribute to Chouchou with the ballet La Boîte à joujoux (The Toy Box)—she died in 1919, during a diphtheria epidemic, but her father was spared that grief by his own death the year before. The Little Shepherd is evoked by a long, winding melody portraying the boy’s improvised piping on his rustic instrument, which is spun out over a simple background. Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum is Debussy’s luminous but chiding sendup of Muzio Clementi’s 1817 compendium of pedantic piano exercises titled Gradus ad Parnassum—Steps to Parnassus. “[It] is a sort-of hygienic and progressive gymnastics,” Debussy wrote to Durand. “It should therefore be played every morning, before breakfast.”
Première rapsodie for Clarinet and Piano Claude DEBUSSY
Composed in 1909-10. Premiered on January 16, 1911 in Paris, with Prosper Mimart as clarinetist. First CMS performance on November 5, 1982. Duration: 8 minutes By 1907, despite his iconoclastic views, his unprecedented musical style, and the
scandals surrounding his personal life (he abandoned his first wife in 1904 for another woman—Paris was deliciously outraged), it could no longer be denied by those in bureaucratic power that Claude Debussy, the author of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, the Nocturnes, and the hotly debated opera Pelléas et Mélisande, had established a significant reputation as a leading French composer. As a sort of backhanded recognition in lieu of the official establishment’s imprimatur of a faculty position at the Paris Conservatoire,
he was invited by Gabriel Fauré, then the school’s director, to help judge the competitions for prizes in wind instrument performance in 1907. Debussy enjoyed the experience, especially since it gave him a chance to study the tone qualities of the flute, oboe, bassoon, and clarinet at close range. Apparently Fauré was pleased with Debussy’s participation, since he invited him to become a regular competition judge in February 1909. In December 1909 and January 1910, Debussy wrote two short works for the 1910 clarinet competitions—a Première rapsodie intended as the principal examination piece and a Petite pièce for sight-reading. When Prosper Mimart, professor of clarinet at the Conservatoire and the dedicatee of the score, gave the public premiere of
the Première rapsodie (Debussy never composed a “deuxième rapsodie”) on January 16, 1911 at a Paris concert of the Société Musicale Indépendente, Debussy allowed that the piece was “among the most pleasant I have ever written.” He orchestrated both clarinet works later that year. As is true of virtually all Debussy’s compositions, the Première rapsodie does not follow a traditional form, but is rather a seemingly free but actually tightly controlled elaboration of several thematic motives wrapped in the luminous harmonies and sonorities of his Impressionistic musical language. The work is in several continuous sections that become more animated and virtuosic as they progress.
Klezmer Sonatina No. 2 for Clarinet and Piano Paul SCHOENFIELD Born January 24, 1947 in Detroit.
Composed in 2014. Premiered on October 2, 2014 at the University of South Carolina in Columbia by clarinetist Joseph Eller and pianist Lynn Kompass. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 13 minutes Paul Schoenfield, born in Detroit in 1947, began studying piano at age six and wrote his first composition the following year; he later studied piano with Julius Chajes, Ozan Marsh, and Rudolf Serkin. Schoenfield received his Doctorate in Musical Arts from the
University of Arizona (at age 22) after earning his undergraduate degree at Carnegie-Mellon University. He worked for several years in the MinneapolisSt. Paul area as a freelance composerpianist and taught in Toledo before serving on the faculty of the University of Akron from 1988 to 1993, while his wife was doing her medical residency at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Cleveland. He has since devoted himself to composition while dividing his time between Israel and the United States. He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2007-08, and joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in September 2008. A man of many interests, Schoenfield is also an avid scholar of mathematics and Hebrew. His biography states, “Paul Schoenfield
is one of an increasing number of contemporary composers whose works are inspired by the whole range of musical experience—popular styles (both American and international) and vernacular folk traditions, as well as the established forms and idioms of cultivated music-making (which are often treated with sly twists). Schoenfield frequently mixes within a single piece ideas that emerged from entirely different musical worlds, making them ‘talk’ to each other, so to speak, and delighting in the surprises that their interaction elicits.”
Schoenfield’s Klezmer Sonatina No. 2 for Clarinet and Piano was commissioned in 2014 by the Clarinet Commission Collective, a group of clarinetists who support the creation of new works for their instrument. The Sonatina No. 2 is in a continuous, multi-sectional movement that grows from the introspective, improvisatorysounding (but precisely notated) opening to a rousing close that calls for mastery of traditional instrumental technique as well as stylistic sympathy from clarinetist and pianist alike.
Sholem-alekhem, rov Feidman! for Clarinet and Piano Béla KOVÁCS Born May 1, 1937 in Tatabánya, Hungary.
Composed in 2004. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 7 minutes Béla Kovács has been one of Hungary’s most highly regarded musicians ever since he was appointed principal clarinetist of the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra and Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra in 1956 at age 19. Kovács was born in 1937 in Tatabánya, 40 miles west of Budapest, where he went in 1951 to study at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. He joined the faculty of the Liszt Academy in 1975 and the University
of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz, Austria in 1989, and now is a professor emeritus at both institutions. In 2004, he also served as visiting professor of clarinet at the Conservatorio di Musica in Udine, Italy. His awards include the Liszt Prize, Kossuth Prize, and Bartók Prize, and in 2011 his life’s work was recognized with honorary membership in the International Clarinet Association. Kovács has composed a number of works for clarinet, including a widely performed set of etudes titled Homages written in the style of various composers. Sholemalekhem, rov Feidman! (Peace Be Upon You, Rabbi Feidman!) is Kovács’ tribute to the celebrated Argentineborn Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman (b. 1936), who helped revitalize klezmer music with his many recordings and international tours.
Concert Fantasia on Themes from Verdi’s Rigoletto for Clarinet and Piano Luigi BASSI Born in 1833 in Cremona. Died in 1871 in Milan.
Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 12 minutes Flashy fantasias on themes from the day’s most popular operas were essential items in the repertory of 19th-century virtuosos, and the leading Italian exponent of such pieces for clarinet as both composer and executant was Luigi Bassi. Bassi was born on an unknown date in 1833 in the Lombardy city of Cremona, where the Amatis, Stradivaris, and Guarneris had revolutionized the art of violin-making two centuries before. He studied at the Milan Conservatory from 1846 to 1853, honing his instrumental technique and composing his first works—a review from his student days noted that his playing showed “surprising mastery for someone who has not yet finished his course at the conservatory.” By the time he graduated, Bassi had become well known in Milan—one critic praised his performance of a fantasia on themes of Verdi between the acts of Rossini’s Barber of Seville—and he was appointed principal clarinetist of the La Scala Orchestra as soon as he left school, a post he occupied until his death in 1871 while also building a parallel career as a soloist and chamber
player and performing for brief periods at Milan’s Teatro Carcano and Teatro all Canobbiana. Bassi composed some two dozen works for his instrument, including a concerto and several recital pieces, but most numerously fantasias and arrangements of themes from operas by Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, Petrella, Mercadante, and Rossini. Bassi’s best-known work is the Concert Fantasia on Themes from Verdi’s Rigoletto, an opera that had triumphed at its premiere at La Fenice in Venice on March 11, 1851 and never waned in popularity. The fantasia’s dramatic piano introduction is based on the opening of the opera. A clarinet cadenza leads to the Act II duet of Rigoletto and his daughter, Gilda (Tutte le feste al tempio—On every festival morning), before a treatment of the Duke’s melody Bella figlia dell’amore (Beautiful daughter of love) from the quartet in Act III. A piano interlude based on the music of the off-stage band in Act I bridges to Caro nome (Sweet name), Gilda’s Act I aria about her ill-fated love for the Duke, and then Scorrendo uniti remota viva (Together we went at nightfall), from the Act II abduction chorus of the Duke’s courtiers. Bassi’s Fantasia closes with Parmi veder le lagrime (I can almost see her tears), sung by the Duke in Act II after Rigoletto has spirited his daughter away from the lecherous nobleman, and a florid coda derived from Caro nome.
Introduction, Theme, and Variations for Clarinet and Piano Gioacchino ROSSINI Born February 29, 1792 in Pesaro, Italy. Died November 13, 1868 in Paris.
Composed in 1809. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 10 minutes Rossini’s musical talents were plainly evident by the time he entered Bologna’s Liceo Filarmonico as a 14-year-old student in April 1806. He had learned to play the horn from his father, who possessed a fine ability on that instrument, and to sing from his mother, a practitioner of comprimario roles in the opera houses of the region. He had also studied piano and written the infectious string sonatas in 1804, two years before he began his formal schooling in composition. He matriculated at the Liceo as a singer, a field in which he had gained enough notice to be admitted by acclamation to the Accademia Filarmonico on June 24, 1806, when he had attained the well-ripened age of 14 years and four months. (Thirty-six years before, the visiting Wolfgang Mozart, also then age 14, had been inducted into the same august society.) In 1808, while still a student, Rossini composed a Mass, a prize-winning cantata for the Liceo’s awards ceremony, a symphony, and his first opera, Demetrio e Polibio; from the following year date a set of variations
for solo instruments and orchestra, a second symphony (which was revised as the overture to the opera La cambiale di matrimonio in 1810), a song for tenor and orchestra, and the Introduction, Theme, and Variations for Clarinet and Piano, which was apparently intended to be played by Rossini’s fellow students as part of their annual examinations and competitions. In 1819, Rossini reworked the theme of the B-flat major Variations as the aria Oh quante lacrime for his opera La donna del lago (The Lady of the Lake). The Introduction, Theme, and Variations, indebted for its inspiration to the elegant Classicism of Haydn and Mozart, is a charming work that lay forgotten for a century and a half after its composition before the European clarinetist Jost Michaels discovered the score in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin in the 1950s and prepared an edition for performance. The piece opens with a slow introduction whose mood resembles some of the more solemn passages in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. A long, sweet cantilena for the clarinet bespeaks Rossini’s gift as a melodist. The principal theme, in quicker tempo, is announced by the soloist. Five variations, separated by piano interludes, explore the virtuosic range and the expressive potential of the clarinet in challenging writing that stands as lasting testimony to the fine abilities of Rossini’s young conservatory friends.
©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
Pianist Gloria Chien was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the Superior Pianists of the year, “… who appears to excel in everything.” She made her orchestral debut at the age of 16 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since then she has appeared as a soloist under the batons of Sergiu Comissiona, Keith Lockhart, Thomas Dausgaard, Irwin Hoffman, Benjamin Zander, and Robert Bernhardt. She is a prize winner of the World Piano Competition, Harvard Musical Association Award, and the San Antonio International Piano Competition, where she also received the prize for the Best Performance of the Commissioned Work. She has presented concerts at Alice Tully Hall, Library of Congress, Gardner Museum, Phillips Collection, Jordan Hall, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Savannah Musical Festival, Dresden Chamber Musical Festival, Kissinger Sommer, Salle Cortot in Paris, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. An avid chamber musician, she has been the resident pianist with the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston since 2000, a group known for its versatility and commitment to new music. Her recent CD with violinist Joanna Kurkowicz featuring music of Grazyna Bacewicz was released on Chandos Records. She has participated in such festivals as Chamber Music Northwest, Verbier Music Festival, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, and Music@Menlo, where she serves as Director of the Chamber Music Institute. Her recent performances include collaborations with David Shifrin, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Joseph Silverstein, Jaime Laredo, Daniel Hope, James Ehnes, Cho-Liang Lin, Ani Kavafian, Ida Kavafian, Wu Han, Paul Neubauer, Jan Vogler, Roberto Diaz, David Finckel, and the St. Lawrence, Miró, Pacifica, Brentano, Borromeo, Daedalus, and Jupiter string quartets. In 2009 she launched String Theory, a chamber music series at the Hunter Museum of American Art in downtown Chattanooga, as its founder and artistic director. A native of Taiwan, Ms. Chien has a doctor of musical arts, a master’s, and an undergraduate degree from the New England Conservatory of Music. Her teachers have included Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun. She is an artist-in-residence at Lee University in Cleveland, TN, and a Steinway Artist. A Yale University faculty member since 1987, clarinetist David Shifrin is artistic director of Yale’s Chamber Music Society series and Yale in New York, a concert series at Carnegie Hall. He has been performing with the Chamber Music Society since 1982 and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004, inaugurating the CMS Two program and the annual Brandenburg Concerto concerts. Currently in his 36th season as artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, he has collaborated with the Guarneri, Tokyo, and Emerson, and Miró string quartets and pianist André Watts. Winner of the Avery Fisher Prize, he is also the recipient of a Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, distinguished alumni awards from the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the Music Academy of the West, and Cultural Leadership Citation from Yale University. A top prize winner in competitions throughout the world, including Munich, Geneva, and San Francisco, he has held principal clarinet positions in The Cleveland Orchestra and the American Symphony (under Leopold Stokowski). He has appeared as soloist with
orchestras in the US including those in Philadelphia, Minnesota, Dallas, Houston, and Detroit and worldwide in countries such as China, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. His recordings have received three Grammy nominations and his performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra was named Record of the Year by Stereo Review. He has also released two CDs of Lalo Schifrin’s compositions, one of which was nominated for a Latin Grammy. At home with the work of such contemporary composers as diverse as John Adams, Joan Tower, Bruce Adolphe, Marc Neikrug, and Ezra Laderman, Mr. Shifrin commissioned a concerto from Ellen Taaffe Zwilich that he premiered at CMS and with the Buffalo Philharmonic in 2002. Delos Records recently released a recording that includes Zwillich’s concerto along with works of Copland, Steven Hartke, and Aaron J. Kernis. He performs exclusively on MoBa clarinets made by Canadian instrument maker Morrie Backun of Mexican cocobolo wood.
Winter 2016
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The Bart贸k Quartet Cycle: Part I The Bart贸k Quartet Cycle: Part II Inside Chamber Music New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse Inside Chamber Music Master Class with the Escher String Quartet Inside Chamber Music Art of the Recital: Anne-Marie McDermott
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upcoming
EVENTS
PIANOS/PIANISTS
Sunday, January 24, 5:00 PM 窶｢ Alice Tully Hall Four exceptional CMS pianists share the stage (and sometimes, piano!), performing works that range from playful to fiery.
THE BARTﾃ適 QUARTET CYCLE: PART I
Thursday, January 28, 7:30 PM 窶｢ Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Featuring the Jerusalem Quartet. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive
BEETHOVEN STRING QUARTETS: PART I Sunday, January 31, 5:00 PM 窶｢ Alice Tully Hall Featuring the Jerusalem Quartet.