David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
ROSE STUDIO CONCERT Thursday Evening, March 10, 2016 at 6:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,548th Concert
MICHAEL BROWN, piano GLORIA CHIEN, piano ANI KAVAFIAN, violin MIHAI MARICA, cello TOMMASO LONQUICH, clarinet
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 the 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.
ROSE STUDIO CONCERT Thursday Evening, March 10, 2016 at 6:30 MICHAEL BROWN, piano GLORIA CHIEN, piano ANI KAVAFIAN, violin MIHAI MARICA, cello TOMMASO LONQUICH, clarinet
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS
(1835-1921)
Sonata in E-flat major for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 167 (1921) Allegretto Allegro animato Lento— Molto allegro LONQUICH, BROWN
ARAM KHACHATURIAN (1903-1978)
Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano (1932) Andante con dolore, con molto espressione Allegro—Allegretto—Allegro agitato— Maestoso pesante Moderato LONQUICH, KAVAFIAN, BROWN
ARNO BABADJANIAN (1921-1983)
Trio in F-sharp minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1952) Largo—Allegro espressivo Andante Allegro vivace CHIEN, KAVAFIAN, MARICA
Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.
notes on the
PROGRAM
Sonata in E-flat major for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 167 Camille SAINT-SAËNS Born October 9, 1835 in Paris. Died December 16, 1921 in Algiers. Composed in 1921. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 16 minutes The last products of Saint-Saëns’ elegant art were the Sonatas for Oboe (Op. 166), Clarinet (Op. 167), and Bassoon (Op. 168), composed during the winter of 1920-21 in Algiers; he was 85. (Two other sonatas, for flute and for English horn, were planned but never realized.) Saint-Saëns had been troubled for some time by shortness of breath and high blood pressure, and he was advised by his physician to spend the cold months in the sunny climes of northern Africa to escape the damp Parisian winter. He fared well in Algiers during the first months of 1921, and vacationed enjoyably at Dieppe on the English Channel that summer. He returned to Paris in the fall for the revival of his Ascanio at the Opéra on November 9th, but was forced to his bed by a severe attack of bronchitis. On December 4th, he was taken to the Hôtel de l’Oasis in Algiers, where he recovered sufficiently to orchestrate his Violin Romance (Op. 27), composed a half century before. It was his final creative act. He died in Algiers, peacefully and painlessly, at 10:30 p.m. on December 16, 1921.
The Sonata for Clarinet and Piano was composed for Auguste Périer (1883-1947), a virtuoso celebrated for his agile technique who was principal clarinetist of the Opéra-Comique and a teacher of the instrument at the Paris Conservatoire from 1919 until his death. The work begins not with a full sonata form but with a leisurely three-part structure that reflects the movement’s equable mood, opening and closing with a serene melody draped across an accompaniment whose gentle, rocking motion suggests the lapping of waves; the center of the movement is more unsettled but no less melodic. The second movement, the sonata’s scherzo, takes a playful, leaping theme as the subject for its outer sections and a widely spaced clarinet motive and bell-tone piano chords for its central episode. The Lento, composed when Saint-Saëns was 85 and ill, is one of his most thoughtful utterances. It consists of two stanzas of a slow, morose, almost funereal theme, the first in the clarinet’s dark low register, the repeat played a celestial two octaves higher. The finale is a showpiece for Périer’s liquescent playing, filled with flashing scales and rocketing arpeggios across the instrument’s entire compass that are thrown into relief by passages of lesser density and more subtle dynamics. Rather than maintaining the virtuosic fireworks to the sonata’s end, however, Saint-Saëns brought the piece around full circle by reprising the placid theme and mood with which it had begun.
Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano Aram KHACHATURIAN Born June 6, 1903 in Tiflis, Armenia. Died May 1, 1978 in Moscow. Composed in 1932. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 16 minutes Among the national cultures that have come to be better known in the West since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 is that of Armenia, Turkey’s eastern neighbor, and Aram Khachaturian was one of the leading composers of the Soviet Union and the most celebrated musician from Armenia. He started his music studies late, but he quickly developed his own distinctive creative voice, which was fully formed by the time he wrote his Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano in 1932 while still a student of Nikolai Miaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory. Sergei Prokofiev, back in Russia after having established his international reputation while living in America and then France during the previous 14 years, heard the piece and recommended its immediate publication; the score appeared simultaneously in Moscow and Paris. Khachaturian was accepted into the Soviet Composers Union later that year. When the trio was played on the occasion of Khachaturian being made an honorary member of Rome’s St. Cecilia Academy in 1960, the noted Italian composer and pedagogue
Goffredo Petrassi told him, “The Moscow Conservatory can be proud of such a student.” The trio’s ensemble—clarinet, violin, and piano—is Khachaturian’s concerthall analogue of a typical Armenian folk-instrument band: a peasant oboe (known variously as zurna, balaban, or duduk), a fiddle played vertically while supported on a spike (ghidjak, kemancha), and a hammered dulcimer. The pervasive influence of traditional Armenian music on the work is likewise reflected in its thematic material, with its modalism, florid ornamentation, and short, recurring phrases. The opening movement (marked to be played “with sadness, with much expression”) is based on a plangent melody, sounded over a drone-like accompaniment, whose three varied stanzas are led in turn by clarinet, violin, and piano. The second movement is structured as a formal arch: A–B–C–B–A. The “frame” (A) at beginning and end is brief and scherzo-like. The movement’s snapping-rhythm main theme (B), given by the clarinet with an obbligato line in the violin, is in the nature of a slow, sinuous dance melody. The central episode (C) is a fantasia on the theme in a quicker tempo. The finale is a set of free variations on the succinct, folkish melody presented by the clarinet at the outset. The treatment of the theme ranges from somber to energetic, but the trio fades to silence at the end, as though the players were setting off to carry their music to the next village.
Trio in F-sharp minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello Arno BABADJANIAN Born January 22, 1921 in Yerevan, Armenia. Died November 11, 1983 in Moscow. Composed in 1952. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 22 minutes Arno Babadjanian was one of Armenia's leading 20th-century musical figures. He was born in 1921 into the family of an accomplished folk musician in Yerevan, the capital and one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, and showed such musical promise that he was admitted to the Yerevan Conservatory at the age of seven; he premiered his Symphony No.1 six years later. His teacher, Vardkes Talian, trained him not only in the Western classics but also in the folk and concert traditions of Armenia, and the interaction of those influences provided the foundation of Babadjanian’s musical style. Babadjanian entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1948 to study piano, composition, and ethnomusicology, and two years later he returned to Armenia to join the faculty of the Yerevan Conservatory. He quickly established a reputation among the country’s leading composers, pianists, and teachers, writing works in a folk-inflected style for orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, voice, and jazz band, performing throughout the Soviet Union and Europe, and receiving the Stalin State Prize, Armenia State Prize, and Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and being
recognized as a People’s Artist of the Armenian SSR and the Soviet Union. Babadjanian’s Piano Trio of 1952 is reminiscent of the style, sonority, and scale of Rachmaninov’s works but infuses the music with a distinctly nationalist tone and spirit. The trio opens with a slow, doleful melody in the unison strings that returns as a unifying device throughout the work. The cello launches without pause into the movement’s main theme, which continues the mood of the introduction with greater animation and more ardent expression. The second theme, introduced by the piano, is brighter in character and colored with the piquant melodic leadings of Armenian folksong. The development section skillfully elaborates both themes, often simultaneously. A recall of the doleful introduction provides a bridge to the recapitulation, which recounts the events of the exposition before the movement closes with one final traversal of the slow opening melody. The Andante is built around an exquisitely lyrical theme balanced by a more intense passage at its center that culminates in another reference to the doleful theme of the first movement. The finale is based on two contrasting themes—one in driving, angular rhythms that nearly turns into a frenzied dance, the other more gentle and regularly phrased. A development section dealing with the angular motive leads to a final, powerful iteration of the first movement’s doleful theme before the trio closes with a stormy coda. ©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
Winner of a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Michael Brown has been described by the New York Times as a “young piano visionary” and “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.” His recent schedule includes debuts with the Seattle and Maryland symphony orchestras, a Carnegie Hall Stern Auditorium debut with the New York Youth Symphony, and recitals at Wigmore Hall, the Louvre, Alice Tully Hall, and Weill Hall. Recent commissions of his own compositions include a piano concerto for the Maryland Symphony Orchestra and works for the Look & Listen Festival, Bargemusic, and the Stecher and Horowitz Foundation. His compositions have been performed at Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Chamber Music Northwest, and in such venues as the Kennedy Center, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and SubCulture. He has recorded several albums, including an all-George Perle CD for Bridge Records and a solo album for CAG Records. Recordings with pianist Jerome Lowenthal, cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and violinist Elena Urioste are all scheduled for release in 2015-16. A native New Yorker, Mr. Brown earned dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. He is the first prize winner of the 2010 Concert Artists Guild Competition and was recently appointed adjunct assistant professor of piano at Brooklyn College. He is a Steinway Artist and a member of Chamber Music Society Two. Picked by the Boston Globe as one of the Superior Pianists of the year, “… who appears to excel in everything,” pianist Gloria Chien 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, and Irwin Hoffman. She has presented concerts at Alice Tully Hall, Library of Congress, Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum, Phillips Collection, Jordan Hall, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Savannah Musical Festival, Kissingen Sommer, Dresden Chamber Musical Festival, Salle Cortot in Paris, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. An avid chamber musician, she has collaborated with artists such as David Shifrin, Daniel Hope, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Jaime Laredo, James Ehnes, Roberto Díaz, David Finckel, Jan Vogler, Soovin Kim, Radovan Vlatković, and Carolin Widmann, and the St. Lawrence, Miró, Pacifica, and Brentano quartets. She also recently released a CD with clarinetist Anthony McGill. In 2009 she launched String Theory, a chamber music series at the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga, as its founder and artistic director. The following year, she was appointed director of the chamber music institute at the Music@Menlo festival by Artistic Directors David Finckel and Wu Han. A native of Taiwan, Ms. Chien is a graduate of the New England Conservatory, where she was a student of Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun. She is an artist-in-residence at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and a Steinway Artist. Violinist Ani Kavafian has enjoyed a career as a chamber musician, recitalist, and soloist with major orchestras. She is also in great demand as a teacher, having taught at the Mannes and Manhattan schools of music, Queens College, McGill, and Stony Brook universities. In 2006 she was appointed Professor in the Practice of Violin at Yale. Ms. Kavafian has appeared as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, as well as the Los Angeles and St. Paul chamber orchestras.
Along with her sister, Ida, she has appeared around the country in recital and as soloists with orchestras. She has performed with the Chamber Music Society since 1972 and she continues to tour the United States, Canada, and Asia with CMS. She performs frequently with clarinetist David Shifrin and pianist André-Michel Schub. Along with cellist Carter Brey, she is the artistic director of the New Jersey chamber music series Mostly Music. A 1979 recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize, she has appeared at the White House on three separate occasions. Ms. Kavafian and Kenneth Cooper have released a live recording of Bach’s six sonatas on the Kleos Classics label. In 2007, a recording of Mozart piano and violin sonatas with pianist Jorge Federico Osorio was released by Artek. Ms. Kavafian is concertmaster of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and performs with it frequently as a soloist. Her instrument is the 1736 Stradivarius violin, the Muir-McKenzie. Italian clarinetist Tommaso Lonquich is solo clarinetist with Ensemble MidtVest, an international chamber ensemble based in Denmark. He has performed on prestigious stages on four continents and at major festivals. As a chamber musician, he has partnered with Klaus Thunemann, Sergio Azzolini, Umberto Clerici, Christoph Richter, Felix Renggli, Claudio Martinez Mehner, Jeffrey Swann, Alexander Lonquich, and the Allegri Quartet. He performs regularly as guest solo clarinetist with the Leonore Orchestra in Italy and others, collaborating with conductors such as Zubin Mehta, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Fabio Luisi, and Leonard Slatkin. He has devised many performances in collaboration with visual artists, dancers, and actors. With Ensemble MidtVest he has been particularly active in improvisation, leading workshops at The Juilliard School. He is vice-president of KantorAtelier, a vibrant cultural space based in Florence, dedicated to the exploration of music, theatre, art, and psychoanalysis. He can be heard on a number of CD releases for DaCapo, CPO, and Col Legno, as well as on radio broadcasts around the world. He graduated from the University of Maryland under the tutelage of Loren Kitt, furthering his studies with Alessandro Carbonare, François Benda, and Michel Arrignon at the Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sofía in Madrid. In 2009 the Queen of Spain awarded him the Escuela’s prestigious annual prize. Other honors include prizes at the Marco Fiorindo International Competition and at the Concerto Competition of the National Symphony Orchestra (USA). He is a member of CMS Two. Romanian-born cellist Mihai Marica is a First Prize winner of the “Dr. Luis Sigall” International Competition in Viña del Mar, Chile and the Irving M. Klein International Competition, and is a recipient of Charlotte White’s Salon de Virtuosi Fellowship Grant. He has performed with orchestras such as the Symphony Orchestra of Chile, Xalapa Symphony in Mexico, the Hermitage State Orchestra of St. Petersburg in Russia, the Jardins Musicaux Festival Orchestra in Switzerland, the Louisville Orchestra, and the Santa Cruz Symphony in the US. He also appeared in recital performances in Austria, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Holland, South Korea, Japan, Chile, the United States, and Canada. A dedicated chamber musician, he has appeared at the Chamber Music Northwest, Norfolk, and Aspen music festivals where he has collaborated with such artists as Ani Kavafian, Ida Kavafian, David Shifrin, André Watts, and Edgar Meyer, and he is a member of the award-winning Amphion String Quartet. Mr. Marica studied with Gabriela Todor in his native Romania and with Aldo Parisot at the Yale School of Music where he was awarded master's and artist diploma degrees. He is a former member of Chamber Music Society Two.
Winter — Spring 2016
WATCH LIVE Enjoy a front row seat from anywhere in the world. View chamber music events streamed live to your computer or mobile device, and available for streaming on demand for the following 24 hours. Relax, browse the program, and experience the Chamber Music Society like never before.
3/10/16 9:00 PM Late Night Rose 3/14/16 11:00 AM Master Class with Sean Lee 3/24/16 7:30 PM New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse 3/31/16 9:00 PM Late Night Rose 4/4/16 11:00 AM Master Class with Wu Han 4/7/16 7:30 PM The Ginastera String Quartet Cycle 4/28/16 7:30 PM New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse 5/5/16 7:30 PM Art of the Recital: Benjamin Beilman & Yekwon Sunwoo 5/19/16 7:30 PM The Kirchner Cycle
All events are free to watch. View full program details online. www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive
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upcoming
EVENTS
MOZART, SCHUBERT, & MENDELSSOHN
Sunday, March 13, 5:00 PM & Tuesday, March 15, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall The virtuosity of the soloist is featured in this program of intimate concertos.
MASTER CLASS WITH SEAN LEE, VIOLIN
Monday, March 14, 11:00 AM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio The art of interpretation and details of technique are explained as master artists share their wisdom with the next generation of chamber musicians. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE
Thursday, March 24, 7:30 PM • Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse The Daedalus Quartet joins CMS Artists to present a concert of works by Fred Lerdahl, John Harbison, Helmut Lachenmann, and Wolfgang Rihm. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive