David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
ROSE STUDIO CONCERT Thursday Evening, March 31, 2016 at 6:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,560th Concert
WU QIAN, piano PAUL HUANG, violin CHO-LIANG LIN, violin MATTHEW LIPMAN, viola SOPHIE SHAO, cello
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. Many donors support the artists of the Chamber Music Society Two program. This evening, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Ann Bowers. 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 31, 2016 at 6:30 WU QIAN, piano PAUL HUANG, violin CHO-LIANG LIN, violin MATTHEW LIPMAN, viola SOPHIE SHAO, cello
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
(1756-1791)
Quartet in G minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, K. 478 (1785) Allegro Andante Rondo: Allegro WU, HUANG, LIPMAN, SHAO
CÉSAR FRANCK (1822-1890)
Quintet in F minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello (1879) Molto moderato quasi lento—Allegro Lento, con molto sentimento Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco WU, LIN, HUANG, LIPMAN, SHAO
Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.
notes on the
PROGRAM
Quartet in G minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, K. 478 Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg. Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna. Composed in 1785. First CMS performance on October 14, 1977. Duration: 26 minutes As Mozart reached his full maturity in the years after arriving in Vienna in 1781, his most expressive manner of writing, whose chief evidences are the use of minor modes, chromaticism, rich counterpoint, and thorough thematic development, appeared in his compositions with increasing frequency. Among the most important harbingers of the shift in Mozart’s musical language was the G minor Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello (K. 478), which he completed on October 16, 1785 in response to a commission for three (some sources say six) such works from the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Hoffmeister had only entered the business a year earlier, and Mozart’s extraordinary and disturbing score, for which the publisher saw little market, threw a fright into him. “Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours!” he admonished. Mozart cast some quaint expletives upon the publisher’s head, and said it was fine with him if the contract were canceled. It was. (Composer and publisher remained friends and associates, however. The following year, Hoffmeister brought out the String
Quartet in D major, K. 499, which still bears his name as sobriquet.) Artaria & Co., proving more bold than Hoffmeister, acquired the piece and published it a year later; there are hints in contemporary documents that it enjoyed a number of performances in Vienna. Alfred Einstein, in his classic 1945 study of Mozart, called the G minor tonality in which the K. 478 Quartet is cast the composer’s “key of fate.... The wild command that opens the first movement, unisono, and stamps the whole movement with its character, remaining threateningly in the background, and bringing the movement to its inexorable close, might be called the ‘fate’ motive with exactly as much justice as the four-note motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” Contrast to the movement’s pervasive agitation is provided by a lyrical melody initiated by the strings without piano. The Andante, in sonatina form (sonata without a development section), is probing, emotionally unsettled music, written in Mozart’s most expressive, adventurous harmonic style. Of the thematically rich closing rondo, English musicologist Eric Blom noted, “[It] confronts the listener with the fascinatingly insoluble problem of telling which of its melodies ... is the most delicious.” So profligate is Mozart’s melodic invention in this movement that he borrowed one of its themes, which he did not even bother to repeat here, for the principal subject of a piano rondo (K. 485) he composed three months later.
Quintet in F minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello César FRANCK Born December 10, 1822 in Liège, Belgium. Died November 8, 1890 in Paris. Composed in 1879. Premiered on January 17, 1880 in Paris by the Marsick Quartet and pianist Camille Saint-Saëns. First CMS performance on April 9, 1972. Duration: 38 minutes At the concert of the Société Nationale de Musique in Paris on December 14, 1878, César Franck’s Piano Trio, Op. 2 was given its first performance in France—36 years after it had been composed. Franck had not written another piece of chamber music since the Trio of 1842, but its enthusiastic Parisian reception encouraged his many students, disciples, and admirers to urge him to take up the chamber forms again. Franck accepted their advice, and he settled on a quintet for piano and strings, a genre then in vogue in Paris because of recent such works by Alexis de Castillon, Félicien David, and George Onslow, as well as the continuing popularity of the piano quintets by Schumann and Brahms. Franck worked on the score throughout 1879 (buoyed in part by another successful performance of the trio on January 25th), and completed the piece shortly before its premiere at the Société Nationale concert on January 17, 1880. The event produced one of the most extraordinary scenes in the annals of French music, when Camille SaintSaëns, founder of the Société Nationale,
pianist in the premiere, and recipient of the work’s dedication, stormed off the stage at the end of the performance, pointedly leaving behind the score that the composer had presented to him. Saint-Saëns was incensed, it seems, by the music’s intense, almost febrile passion, a quality that the premiere audience acclaimed but from which the fastidious Camille surmised illicit motivations. César Franck, exemplary church organist, author of high-minded compositions, head of a well-ordered family life with his wife and children— the purported Pater Seraphicus of French music—was rumored to have been inspired to write the quintet by his feelings for a student not half his age, a young female composer named Augusta Holmès. Mlle. Holmès, in her mid-20s when Franck composed his quintet, was born in Paris of Irish parents, and displayed considerable talents as a poet, singer, and all-round musician. SaintSaëns claimed that “we are all of us in love with her,” and dedicated to her his symphonic tone poem Rouet d’Omphale (Omphale’s Spinning Wheel). Vincent d’Indy, Franck’s devoted pupil and eventual biographer, said, “I am completely infatuated with the beautiful Augusta!” Franck also seems not to have been immune to her apparently irresistible charms. In speaking with one of the composer’s students, someone once claimed that Franck was a mystic and received the reply, “A mystic? Go ask Augusta Holmès.” The bitter condemnation that Félicité Franck heaped upon her husband’s Piano Quintet indicates that she was incensed at more than just the musical content of
the piece. Even the worldly Franz Liszt, a long-time champion of Franck’s music, thought that the quintet’s vehement expression may have overstepped the bounds of proper chamber music. It may (or may not) be significant that Franck’s next composition was a beatific cantata on the Biblical story of Rebecca; Félicité applauded the work’s decorum and reserve. The quintet’s opening movement is a large, thematically rich sonata form that draws much of its material from the two starkly contrasted motives presented in the introduction: a dramatically impassioned descending line in the violin and a humble piano reply in sad, rocking rhythms. These two ideas are repeated in juxtaposition to lead without pause to the main body of the movement, whose principal subject is derived from the introduction’s descending motive. A wealth of complementary themes follows, most lyrical, many with a restlessness that provides the music’s dominant emotional personality of yearning tinged with inchoate tragedy.
The emotional temperature of the quintet drops somewhat for the Lento, whose main theme is presented by the violin in disjunct phrases floated upon a pulsing piano accompaniment. The movement’s subsidiary subject is given in dialogue between the first violin and cello with a smooth, wide-ranging counterpoint provided by the piano. A faint echo of a theme from the first movement provides a sense of cyclical unity. A brief development section and a condensed recapitulation complete the movement. An agitated figure in the violins ushers in the finale’s principal theme, a tragicheroic motive in leaping rhythms first stated in its full form by unison strings. The second theme, derived from a motive heard in the Lento, is played by the piano against a rustling string background. After the development, which is based largely on the main theme, and the recapitulation, the quintet ends with a triumphant coda whose broad theme is a transformation of a motive used in both earlier movements, thus unifying the form of the entire work.
©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
Recipient of a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Taiwanese-American violinist Paul Huang is quickly gaining attention for his eloquent music making, distinctive sound, and effortless virtuosity. His busy season includes debuts with the Louisiana Philharmonic, Brevard Symphony, and Seoul Philharmonic, as well as return engagements with the Detroit Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Hilton Head Symphony, Bilbao Symphony, National Symphony of Mexico, and National Taiwan Symphony. This season he performs in London in Wigmore Hall, as well as in Munich, Madrid, and Prague, and appears in recitals at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach; and performs chamber music on the Caramoor Festival’s Rising Stars series. In addition to his soldout recital at Lincoln Center on the Great Performers series, he has performed at the Morgan Library and Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Jordan Hall, the Stradivari Museum in Cremona, Italy, the Seoul Arts Center in Korea, the National Concert Hall in Taiwan, and the Louvre in Paris. His first solo CD, a collection of favorite encores, is on the CHIMEI label. Mr. Huang, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard, won the 2011 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and received Taiwan’s 2009 Chi-Mei Cultural Foundation Arts Award. He plays the Guarneri del Gesù Cremona 1742 ex-Wieniawski violin, on loan through the Stradivari Society, and is a member of Chamber Music Society Two. In a concert career that has spanned the globe for more than 30 years, Cho-Liang Lin is equally at home with orchestra, in recital, playing chamber music, and in the teaching studio. His recent concert engagements include solo appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Nashville Symphony, English Chamber Orchestra, Stockholm Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, and the Royal Philharmonic. In 2000 Musical America named him Instrumentalist of the Year. He has enjoyed collaborations and premieres with composers such as John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lalo Schifrin, Paul Schoenfield, Bright Sheng, Steven Stucky, Tan Dun, Joan Tower, John Williams, and many more. He has been music director of La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest since 2001; he also serves as artistic director of Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival. Mr. Lin’s recordings have won such awards as Gramophone’s Record of the Year, as well as Grammy Award nominations. Born in Taiwan, Mr. Lin studied at the Sydney Conservatorium before enrolling at The Juilliard School to study with Dorothy DeLay at age 15. He was invited to join the faculty of The Juilliard School in 1991. He is currently a professor at Rice University and plays the 1715 “Titian” Stradivarius. Recipient of a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, American violist Matthew Lipman has been hailed by the New York Times for his “rich tone and elegant phrasing” and by the Chicago Tribune for his “splendid technique and musical sensitivity.” His debut recording of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with violinist Rachel Barton Pine and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields with Sir Neville Marriner was recently released on the Avie label. He has performed with the Juilliard, Minnesota, Grand Rapids Symphony, Wisconsin Chamber, Ars Viva Symphony, and Montgomery Symphony
orchestras. The only violist featured on WFMT Chicago’s recent list of “30 Under 30” top classical musicians, he has been profiled by The Strad and BBC Music magazines and recently performed Penderecki’s Cadenza for solo viola live on WQXR with the composer in attendance. A member of CMS Two, Mr. Lipman has performed with the Chamber Music Society at Alice Tully Hall, Wigmore Hall, and the Kissinger Sommer Festival in Germany, and under the auspices of the Marlboro, Ravinia, Perlman Music Program, and the Music@Menlo festivals. A top prizewinner of the Tertis, Primrose, Washington, Stulberg, and Johansen International competitions, Mr. Lipman is the recipient of a Kovner Fellowship at The Juilliard School, where he serves as a teaching assistant to Heidi Castleman. He has also studied with Steven Tenenbom, Misha Amory, and Roland Vamos, and performs on a 1700 Matteo Goffriller viola from the REB foundation. Cellist Sophie Shao received an Avery Fisher Career Grant at age 19, was a major prizewinner at the 2001 Rostropovich Competition, and was a laureate of the XII Tchaikovsky Competition in 2002. She has given the world premiere performances of Howard Shore’s Mythic Gardens, a concerto written for her, and Richard Wilson’s Concerto for Cello and Mezzo-Soprano with Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra. She has also appeared as soloist with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Keith Lockhart in performances of the Elgar and Haydn C major concertos; performed Saint-Saëns’ La Muse et Le Poete with violinist Miranda Cuckson at the Bard Music Festival; and presented the six Bach Suites in one afternoon at Union College in Schenectady. She can be heard on EMI Classics, Bridge Records (Marlboro Music’s 50th anniversary recording), and on Albany Records, and will release a double-CD set of the Bach Cello Suites this season. Ms. Shao studied at the Curtis Institute with David Soyer and Felix Galimir, and, upon graduating, continued with Aldo Parisot at Yale University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies from Yale College and a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, where she was enrolled as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. Ms. Shao is a former member of CMS Two, on the faculty of Vassar College, and plays an Honore Derazey cello previously owned by Pablo Casals. Selected as classical music’s bright young star for 2007 by The Independent, pianist Wu Qian has appeared as soloist in many international venues including the Wigmore, Royal Festival, and Bridgewater halls in the UK, City Hall in Hong Kong, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. As an orchestral performer, she has appeared with the Konzerthaus Orchester in Berlin, the Brussels Philharmonic, I Virtuosi Italiani, the European Union Chamber Orchestra, the Munich Symphoniker, and many others. Wu Qian is the first prize winner of the Trio di Trieste Duo Competition, the Kommerzbank Piano Trio competition in Frankfurt, and has received numerous other awards. Her debut recording of Schumann, Liszt, and Alexander Prior was met with universal critical acclaim and her next disc, an all-Schumann program, is due to be released this year. She is a founding member of the Sitkovetsky Piano Trio. In addition to performing in major concert halls and series around the world, this acclaimed young trio has released two recordings on the BIS label and also a disc of Brahms and Schubert on the Wigmore Live Label. Wu Qian is a member of Chamber Music Society Two.
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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.
3/31/16 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 String Quartet Cycle
All events are free to watch. View full program details online. www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive
upcoming
EVENTS
DAVID FINCKEL AND WU HAN: RESONANCE
Sunday, April 3, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall The power of music to excite, inspire, transport, and impassion is revealed in this unique program featuring CMS artistic directors.
MASTER CLASS WITH WU HAN
Monday, April 4, 11:00 AM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio CMS co-artistic director Wu Han leads a master class with talented young artists. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive
THE GINASTERA STRING QUARTET CYCLE
Thursday, April 7, 7:30 PM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Featuring soprano Kiera Duffy and the Miró Quartet. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive