David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
THE ART OF THE RECITAL GILBERT KALISH
Thursday Evening, April 30, 2015 at 7:30 Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio 3,443rd Concert
45th Anniversary Season
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 10th Floor New York, NY 10023 212-875-5788 www.ChamberMusicSociety.org
Many thanks to flutist Carol Wincenc and violist Mark Holloway. This concert is made possible, in part, by the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the Samuel I. Newhouse 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, April 30, 2015 at 7:30
GILBERT KALISH, piano
GEORGE CRUMB
Processional for Piano (1984)
(b. 1929)
PERRY GOLDSTEIN (b. 1952)
...shreds and patches...for Piano (CMS Co-Commission, World Premiere) (2015) I. Insistent—II. Tolling, luminous—III. Puckish IV. Dreamy—V. Jazzy and driving—VI. Floating, then lonely VII. Ecstatic and heartbreaking
SHEILA SILVER (b. 1946)
LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854-1928)
Nocturne, Based on Raga Jog for Piano (CMS Co-Commission, World Premiere) (2015) In the Mists for Piano (1912) Andante Molto Adagio—Presto Andantino Presto
—INTERMISSION— CHARLES IVES (1874-1954)
Sonata No. 2 for Piano, “Concord, Mass., 1840-60” (c. 1911-15, rev. 1920s-40s) Emerson Hawthorne The Alcotts Thoreau
This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited. Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices.
meet tonight’s
ARTIST
The profound influence of pianist Gilbert Kalish as an educator and pianist in myriad performances and recordings has established him as a major figure in American musicmaking. In 2006 he was awarded the Peabody Medal by the Peabody Conservatory for his outstanding contributions to music in America. He was the pianist of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players for 30 years, and was a founding member of the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, a group that flourished during the 1960s and 70s in support of new music. He is particularly known for his partnership of many years with mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, as well as for current collaborations with soprano Dawn Upshaw and cellists Timothy Eddy and Joel Krosnick. As an educator and performer he has appeared at the Banff Centre, the Steans Institute at Ravinia, the Marlboro Music Festival, and Music@Menlo; he is currently the International Program Director of Music@Menlo’s Chamber Music Institute, and from 1985 to 1997 he served as chairman of the Tanglewood faculty. His discography of some 100 recordings embraces both the classical and contemporary repertories; of special note are that of Ives’ Concord Sonata, five volumes of Haydn piano sonatas, and an immense discography of vocal music with DeGaetani. He is the recipient of the 2002 Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award from Chamber Music America and the 1995 Paul Fromm Award from the University of Chicago Music Department for distinguished service to the music of our time. A distinguished professor at SUNY Stony Brook, Mr. Kalish has performed with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 2004.
notes on the
PROGRAM
Processional for Piano George CRUMB Born October 24, 1929 in Charleston, West Virginia. Composed in 1984. Premiered on July 26, 1984 at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts by GIlbert Kalish. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 10 minutes George Crumb is one of the most frequently performed composers in today’s musical world. Crumb’s music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles, ranging from the western artmusic tradition, to hymns and folk music,
to non-Western musics. Many of Crumb’s works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical, and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in his beautiful and meticulously notated scores. A shy, yet warmly eloquent personality, Crumb retired from his teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania after more than 30 years of service. He has been honored by numerous institutions with honorary doctorates and has been the recipient of dozens of awards and prizes, including a Grammy and Pulitzer Prizes. Crumb makes his home in Pennsylvania, in the same house where he and his wife of more than 60 years raised their three children. George Crumb’s music is published by C.F. Peters and an ongoing
series of “Complete Crumb” recordings, supervised by the composer, is being issued on Bridge Records. Crumb wrote, “Processional was composed in 1984 for pianist Gilbert Kalish, who premiered the work on July 26, 1984 at Tanglewood. Like much of my music, Processional is strongly tonal, but integrates chromatic, modal, and whole-tone elements. The descending six tones stated at the beginning present the basic harmonic cell, subsequently elaborated by varied cluster combinations and permutations. Although Processional is essentially a continuum of sustained legato playing, tiny melodic fragments
(which intermittently emerge and recede) provide contrast in articulation. “I think of Processional as an ‘experiment in harmonic chemistry’ (Debussy’s description of his Images for piano)— the music is concerned with the prismatic effect of subtle changes of harmonic color and frequent modulation. The title of the work was suggested by the music’s obsessive reiteration of pulse (‘sempre pulsando, estaticamente’) and broad ‘unfolding’ gestures. Perhaps the music suggests more a ‘processional of nature’ rather than any sort of festive or somber ‘human’ processional.”
...shreds and patches... for Piano Perry GOLDSTEIN Born February 20, 1952 in New York City. Composed in 2015; co-commissioned by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Tonight is the world premiere of this piece. Duration: 8 minutes Composer, writer, educator, and broadcaster Perry Goldstein was born in New York City in 1952 and studied at the University of Illinois, UCLA, and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in music composition in 1986. Goldstein taught at Wilmington College of Ohio and the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati before joining the faculty of SUNY-Stony Brook in 1992, where he has received “Chancellor’s and President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.” Goldstein’s
many other musical activities include producing and hosting programs on contemporary music for NPR-affiliate WILL in Urbana, Illinois, writing extensively for The New York Times, Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, San Antonio Symphony, and other publications and institutions, authoring a textbook on Rudiments of Music and co-authoring A New Approach to Sight Singing, providing liner notes for Arabesque, Bridge, Challenge, CRI, GM, Folkways, New World, and Vanguard Classics records, and serving as a National Advisor to the League-ISCM, a music panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts, and the United States delegate to the UNESCO-sponsored International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, about which he subsequently produced four radio programs for American Public Radio. Goldstein has composed some 50 well-received works for many notable
performers that have appeared on nearly 20 compact discs. Of …shreds and patches…, composed in 2015 for pianist Gilbert Kalish, Goldstein wrote, “…shreds and patches… is a set of seven miniatures, the first six each a little under or over a minute in duration, the last about one minute and forty-five seconds. The piece seeks to express a wide variety of characters, materials, and emotions in a compressed manner, for example, loneliness in arid trills over a slow repeating bass in movement VI, playfulness in the sparkling, unpredictable, and sudden quiet explosions of sound in movement III, dreaminess in slow-moving chords in movement II, manic activity in movement I, and fierce tenderness in movement VII. The piece toggles between incomplete wisps of sound and repetition to the point of insistent redundancy. “The seven movements are divided into three sections: I-III and IV-VI played without pause, leaving movement VII to stand alone. Movements I and V are propulsive, insistent, and jazzy, and share the same harmonic and motivic
material. Movements II, IV, and VI are slow-moving and dreamy, and movement III, though different in sensibility than the more meditative movements II, IV, and VI, nevertheless shares a common element with IV. “Bearing little in common with the materials and more fragmentary nature of the previous six movements, movement VII is the outlier, presenting an outpouring of continuous sound. Titled Ecstatic and heartbreaking, the movement threads long lines of motivic bits from [English composer] Thomas Tallis’ 16th-century anthem setting of the 10th-century hymn O Nata Lux (O light born of light) against a multi-layered pulsing of eighth notes that also slowly unfolds motives from the Tallis setting. “…shreds and patches… is the third piece I have been privileged to write for Gilbert Kalish, though the first one for solo piano. In writing a piece that states little but signifies much, I sought to express a range of rich emotions, not the least of which are tenderness and gratitude for almost 25 years of friendship.”
Nocturne, Based on Raga Jog for Piano Sheila SILVER Born October 3, 1946 in Seattle.
Composed in 2015; co-commissioned by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Tonight is the world premiere of this piece. Duration: 10 minutes
Sheila Silver, one of America’s most talented, innovative, and lauded composers, was born in Seattle on October 3, 1946. She studied at the University of Washington in 1964-65 before taking a course at the Institute for European Studies in Paris in 1966-67. After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley (1968), she returned to France to enroll at the Paris Conservatoire. Following additional
study at the Hochschule für Musik in rehearsals and performances, he knows Stuttgart, the Darmstadt Festival, and the exactly how to play my music. Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Silver finished her doctorate at Brandeis “I have been studying Hindustani classical University in 1976. Since 1979, she has music for the past couple of years as taught at the State University of New part of my journey to compose an opera York at Stony Brook, where she is now based on A Thousand Splendid Suns. Professor of Music. Among Silver’s The story takes place in Afghanistan many honors are the Prix de Paris, Rome and the music of Afghanistan is north Prize, American Academy of Arts and Indian—or Hindustani—classical music. Letters’ Composers Award, Sackler Prize My goal is to color my Western voice in Opera, Bunting Institute Fellowship, with Hindustani classical music. I took a 2014 Opera America Discovery Grant a break from the opera to compose this for Female Composers, funded by the piece for Gil. Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, and a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship (both for “In India I had been learning the raga the opera she is currently composing called Jog (the ‘o’ is pronounced as in based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel A ‘know’). A raga, like a Western scale, has a series of pitches Thousand Splendid Suns), but unlike a scale it also as well as awards and commissions from the My goal is to color has certain characteristic Rockefeller Foundation, my Western voice melodic phrases. There are hundreds of ragas. The Cary Trust, ISCM with Hindustani pitches of raga Jog are: National Composers classical music. C, E-flat, E-natural, F, G, Competition, Camargo B-flat, C (no 2nd degree, Foundation, MacDowell Colony, New York State Council of no 6th degree, and two 3rd degrees—and the Arts, Barlow Foundation, Fromm of course this scale can be transposed to Foundation, and National Endowment for begin on any pitch). Part of the beauty of Jog is how the two 3rd degrees are the Arts. approached and connected. In preparation for composing her new opera, Silver recently spent six months in “Raga Jog is performed during the Pune, India, where she studied Hindustani evening hours, hence the work’s title, music with Pandit Kedar Narayan Bodas Nocturne, and evokes the emotions of love to help her incorporate an authentic (romantic and spiritual), connection to Hindustani color into her Western creative God (one’s higher self), and overcoming voice. (Hindustani music is at the core of emotional turbulence. Ragas all have the music of Afghanistan, where the opera emotional and spiritual subtexts: ‘Jog’ takes place.) Silver wrote, “Nocturne, means connection. Based on Raga Jog is the fifth work I have composed over the past 25 years “For this piece, I decided to let a simple for my dear friend and colleague Gilbert melody that I had composed in Jog lead Kalish. I love writing for Gil—besides me through an odyssey of improvisatory the fact that we have a lot of fun during variation. Nocturne unfolds as follows:
a slow and free introductory section presents the basic melodic material (a little like an ‘alap’ in Hindustani music); and then comes a tune with a specific meter (in this case, 7/16 followed by 7/8—7’s and multiples of 7 run throughout the piece). After that, Nocturne develops
freely but my classical roots go deep so there is a return to the opening material, transformed. I do not adhere dogmatically to the raga or the original key, as would a classical Hindustani raga presentation. I simply use the raga as a starting point for my invention.”
In the Mists for Piano Leoš JANÁČEK Born July 3, 1854 in Hukvaldy, Moravia, Czech Republic. Died August 12, 1928 in Ostrava.
Composed in 1912. Premiered on January 24, 1914 in Brno by Marie Dvořáková. First CMS performance on January 20, 1998. Duration: 15 minutes
In 1912, when his ambitions as a composer had largely been thwarted, when his marriage offered little comfort, when he was having problems with severe rheumatism, and apprehensively facing his 58th birthday, Janáček channeled his remorse and frustration into a set of four disquieting piano pieces that he titled, perhaps in contemplating his own uncertain future, In the Mists. In
the Mists is music of strong, unsettling emotions: the phrases are fragmented or of irregular lengths; the harmony is unstable; the rhythms proceed fitfully; ferocious outbursts collapse into brooding introspection; the episodes of aural beauty or melodic continuity—the Debussian chord streams of the first movement, or the folk tune of the third—seem ironic rather than restful, and only heighten the apprehension of the surrounding music. “In the Mists does not contain a single moment of cheerful respite,” Jaroslav Vogel wrote in his 1981 biography of the composer. “It is one long struggle between resignation and newly felt pain—pain which gains the upper hand at the end. In my opinion, the title In the Mists should be interpreted as meaning not so much memories of childhood or impressions of nature, as the expression of Janáček’s mental state at the time, in view of the petty indifference shown by the world to his work in general and to [the opera] Jenůfa in particular.” © 2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
Sonata No. 2 for Piano, “Concord, Mass., 1840-60” Program note by Gilbert Kalish Charles IVES Born October 20, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. Died May 19, 1954 in New York City. Composed in 1911-15, revised 1920s-40s. Premiered on January 20, 1939 in New York City by John Kirkpatrick. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 50 minutes Between 1902 and 1918 Charles Ives led an extraordinary dual life. While working full time during those years as a beloved, respected, and innovative insurance executive, he also composed at a furious rate at every possible moment—in the evenings, on weekends, during brief periods of vacation, and even on the train between Danbury and New York. By 1918, when he suffered a serious heart attack, Ives had composed some six symphonies, almost 150 songs, four sonatas for violin and piano, two string quartets, two massive piano sonatas, 40 sacred anthems and psalm settings for chorus, and many other works for a wide variety of forces. Rarely has a major composer been so isolated from the mainstream of the “classical” musical life of his time. During the period of his most intense activity as a composer Ives heard very few of the works of his great European contemporaries (“listening to concert music seemed to confuse me in my own work… to throw me off from what I had in mind”); moreover, he had little contact with the practicing musicians of his day.
When professional musicians did attempt to perform Ives’ music, the result was often traumatic for the composer. In his Memos, Ives recalls the time he showed his First Violin Sonata to Franz Milcke, a respected German violinist. “He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and got mad. He said, ‘This cannot be played. It is awful. It is not music, it makes no sense.’ Such experiences produced in Ives a fierce animosity towards the “easy” and “soft” music of the concert hall. Shunning the company and even the approbation of “celebrated musicians,” he grew ever more rugged, independent, and unorthodox in his musical language. He also developed a philosophy of performance and of the compositional process that could only have arisen outside the circuit of professional concert-giving: constantly revising his own works, Ives began to see a virtue in not establishing a “final” version. The Concord Sonata, Ives’ largest piece for solo piano, was a work the composer returned to time after time, continually rewriting passages, adding a chord, enriching a harmony, questioning a flat or sharp, stripping away superfluous material. Ives has described the “daily pleasure of playing this music and seeing it grow and feeling that it is not finished.” In speaking of his own playing of the piece, he says, “I find that I don’t play or feel like playing this music even now in the same way each time. Some of the passages now played haven’t been written out—and I don’t know as I shall ever write them out… This is the only piece which every time I play it or turn
to it, seems unfinished.” Written for the most part between 1911 and 1915, the Concord Sonata was to a large degree derived from three orchestral sketches that Ives had worked on during the first decade of the century, each devoted to a New England Transcendentalist whom Ives wished to portray in music. The “Emerson” movement is an outgrowth of the Emerson Concerto (1907), a work projected for piano and orchestra. The “Hawthorne” movement is a reworking of a planned Hawthorne Concerto (1910), and the “Alcotts” movement is based on the Orchard House Overture (c. 1904)—also never realized. “Thoreau”—which served as the source for Ives’ song of the same name—had no orchestral antecedent. While recuperating from his heart attack in 1918, Ives recopied the entire Concord Sonata, and both the sonata and his supplementary Essays Before a Sonata (written in 1919) were published in 1920. But Ives was still not content to let the published version be the final word; in the long years of his retirement— first from composing and then from his insurance firm—he maintained a deep interest in the work. He kept modifying and adding to it throughout the 1930s and early 40s, and, with the help of copyist George F. Roberts, he prepared a revised edition of the work that was published by Arrow Music Press in 1947, subsequently acquired and republished by Associated Music Publishers. This edition is the one basically used in the performance heard here. However, certain alternate versions were used in a number of passages, following a thorough investigation of the available materials, including manuscripts
and Ives’ heavily emended copy of the first edition: Ives himself not only played the sonata differently at different times, but seemed intent on preserving the ideal of a performance in which the player could choose from a variety of possible solutions. Roberts recalls the copying sessions with Ives: “On 74th Street we’d go to the top floor, Ives creeping on all fours… Once there, he’d always offer me a cigar. He had them there for Carl Ruggles, and I don’t know how many years he had them, but they were dust… He had a piano in the studio on 74th Street and he’d play, sometimes, for a couple of hours, if he got started on something… I did some of the Concord Sonata. Every time I went there it was new. The printers were on his neck all the time. He used to laugh about it. He didn’t care; he was in no hurry, and he always had something new to put in.” For the performer of this monumental work, the ephemeral quality of the printed text is an unusual and exhilarating challenge. It is not so much that one is given an option of whether a particular note is to be changed or not (that is not ultimately of the greatest moment) but that one is explicitly told by the composer to be daring, to improvise, to let the music lead one to the inner pulse rather than be led by the printed page. “In fact, these notes, marks and near pictures of sounds, etc. are for the player to make his own speeches on.” Thus, in Ives’ discussion of “Emerson,” he comments, “Throughout this movement, and to some extent in the others, there are many passages not to be too evenly played and in which the tempo is not precise or static; it varies usually with the mood of the day. A metronome
cannot measure Emerson’s mind and oversoul, any more than the old Concord Steeple Bell could.”
arpeggiated. In “Hawthorne” Ives even asks that a 14¾-inch board be used to play an otherworldly tone cluster. Ives’ use of the pedals is both personal and original. In “Thoreau” he says, “Both pedals are used almost constantly;” in the context of this movement the pedals create an impressionistic haze very much akin to the music of Debussy. Again in “Hawthorne,” in addition to specific coloristic pedal indications, Ives states, “the use of the sustaining pedal is almost constantly required.” Here, Ives clearly wants this ferocious and fantastical scherzo to thunder and resonate with all the power that a modern grand piano is capable of producing.
Alongside this unconventional approach toward the “finished” composition and the role of the performer, Ives displayed an increasing idealism, together with an almost naïve lack of concern for the practical aspects of performance. Toward the end of “Emerson,” for example, he dares to introduce a barely audible but absolutely inspired passage for viola that lasts just two measures. Most substantial is a part for flute in “Thoreau”—a brilliant and poetic gesture that portrays “a mist heard over Walden Pond.” Ives writes in the score, “A flute may play throughout this page… If Ives’ vision was truly as transcendental as that of the New England no flute, the brace is philosophers. As he for piano alone… but Thoreau much prefers Ives’ vision was truly writes in the Prologue to the Essays Before to hear the flute over as transcendental a Sonata, “we would Walden.” as that of the New rather believe that music England philosophers. is beyond any analogy Although Ives’ keyboard to word language and writing is often massive in range and structure, with a granite- that the time is coming, but not yet in our like juxtaposition of chords, it displays a lifetime, when it will develop possibilities rich contrapuntal texture. A glance at the inconceivable now,—a language, so unusually abundant use of extra staves in transcendent, that its heights and depths the score of the Concord Sonata, and the will be common to all mankind.” When careful stemming of notes, discloses his John Kirkpatrick gave his historic first concern with voice-leading and the proper performance of the Concord Sonata on balance of sonorities. The massiveness of January 20, 1939, in New York’s Town the writing also reflects an “orchestral” Hall, Lawrence Gilman, music critic of approach to the piano, a striving for the New York Herald Tribune, described richness and grandeur of sound by using it as “music by an unexampled creative the entire range of the instrument at once. artist of our day, probably the most There is a continuous use of arpeggios original and extraordinary of American accurate, although and broken or rolled chords. There are composers”—an also innumerable chords that are too painfully belated, recognition of one of large to be struck simultaneously by most the most exuberant and gifted figures in pianists, which consequently must also be the artistic history of our nation.
upcoming
EVENTS
BEETHOVEN & LIGETI
Sunday, May 3, 2015, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Beethoven’s defining “Archduke” piano trio completes a program of grand works, including Beethoven’s sparkling Piano Quintet, and György Ligeti’s classic Horn Trio.
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE
Thursday, May 7, 2015, 7:30 PM • Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse Featuring the U.S. Premiere of Monumentum-Music for String Sextet by David Philip Hefti, alongside works by Paul Lansky, Witold Lutoslawski, Andy Akiho, and more. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive
MASTER CLASS WITH JASON VIEAUX, GUITAR
Wedensday, May 13, 2015, 11:00 AM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio The art of interpretation and details of technique are shared by master artists. This event will also be streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive