ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIFTH SEASON
Tuesday, December 2, 2025, at 6:30
CSO Chamber Music Series
ELYSIAN TRIO
John Sharp Cello
Stephen Williamson Clarinet
Umi Garrett Piano
BRUCH
BEETHOVEN
Selections from Eight Pieces, Op. 83
Andante
Allegro con moto
Nachtgesang: Andante con moto
Piano Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11
Allegro con brio
Adagio
Theme and Variations on Pria ch’io l’impegno
INTERMISSION
BRAHMS
Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 114
Allegro
Adagio
Andantino grazioso
Allegro
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
COMMENTS
by Richard E. Rodda
MAX BRUCH
Born January 6, 1838; Cologne, Germany
Died October 20, 1920; Friedenau, near Berlin, Germany
Selections from Eight Pieces, Op. 83
COMPOSED 1909
Max Bruch, widely known and respected in his day as a composer, conductor, and teacher, received his earliest music instruction from his mother, a noted singer and pianist. He began composing at eleven, and by fourteen had produced a symphony and a string quartet, the latter garnering a prize that allowed him to study with Reinecke and Hiller in Cologne. Bruch held various posts as a choral and orchestral conductor in Cologne, Coblenz, Sondershausen, Berlin, Liverpool, and Breslau, and in 1883, he visited America to conduct concerts of his own compositions. From 1890 to 1910, he taught composition at the Berlin Academy and received numerous awards for his work, including an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. Though Bruch is known mainly for three famous compositions for string soloist and orchestra (the G minor concerto and Scottish Fantasy for violin and Kol Nidrei for cello), he also composed two other violin concertos, three symphonies, a concerto for two pianos, various chamber
pieces, songs, three operas, and much choral music.
Bruch composed his Eight Pieces, op. 83, in 1909, in his seventieth year, for his son Max Felix, a talented clarinetist who also inspired a double concerto (op. 88) for his instrument and viola from his father two years later. When the younger Bruch played the works in Cologne and Hamburg, Fritz Steinbach reported favorably on the event to the composer, comparing Max Felix’s ability with that of Richard Mühlfeld, the clarinetist who had inspired two sonatas, a quintet, and a trio from Johannes Brahms two decades before.
Clarinet and cello are here evenly matched, singing together in duet or conversing in dialogue, while the piano serves as an accompanimental partner. Bruch intended that the Eight Pieces be regarded as a set of independent miniatures of various styles rather than as an integrated cycle and advised against playing all of them together in concert. The pieces (ranging from three to six minutes in length) are straightforward in structure—binary (A-B) or ternary (A-B-A) for the first six, compact sonata form for the last two—and are, with one exception (no. 7), all in thoughtful minor keys.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Piano Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11
COMPOSED 1797–98
Beethoven first acquired his reputation as a pianist after arriving in Vienna in 1792, a flamboyant young man of untamed spirit, particularly noted for the power and invention of his improvisations. It was with the premiere of his Second Piano Concerto in March 1795 (numbered higher than his 1798 piano concerto [no. 1] because it was published later) that his fame as a composer began to flourish. Some of the compositions from the years immediately following show his eagerness to stretch the boundaries of the conventional forms and modes of expression, but most of his music of the 1790s still pays obeisance to the tradition and taste of the time. Such a work is the Trio in B-flat major, op. 11, originally composed for piano, clarinet, and cello in 1798, but authorized by the composer upon the score’s publication in 1798 for performance with violin replacing the clarinet. The B-flat trio was intended to please the drawing-room sensibilities of the Viennese public, and to help ensure
its success, Beethoven based the last movement on a well-known tune, “Pria ch’io l’impegno,” from Joseph Weigl’s popular comic opera L’amor marinaro, which had been unveiled at the Hoftheater in November 1797. (Such a tactic was then common—Hummel and Joseph Wölfl both composed variations on the melody shortly after Beethoven, and Paganini created a Grand Sonata and Variations for Violin and Orchestra on it as late as 1828.)
The trio’s opening sonata-form movement begins with a bold, striding phrase presented in unison as the first of several motifs comprising the main theme group. The complementary themes are introduced following two loud chords, a silence and an unexpected harmonic sleight-of-hand. The movement’s development section is largely concerned with the striding motif of the main theme. The Adagio is based on a melody of Mozartian tenderness first sung by the cello before being shared with the clarinet. The finale is the straightforward set of nine variations and a finale on Weigl’s melody, a movement that Beethoven repeatedly promised Czerny he would replace with a more substantial one, but never did.
opposite page: Max Bruch, ca. 1900 | this page: Ludwig van Beethoven, engraving by Johann Joseph Neidl (1776–1832) after a portrait by Gandolph Ernst Stainhauser von Treuberg (1766–1805), 1801
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany
Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria
Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 114
COMPOSED 1891
Among Brahms’s close friends and musical colleagues during his later years was the celebrated pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who played Brahms’s music widely and made it a mainstay in the repertory of the superb court orchestra at Meiningen during his tenure there as music director from 1880 to 1885. Soon after arriving at Meiningen, Bülow invited Brahms to be received by music-loving Duke Georg and his consort, Baroness von Heldburg, and the composer was provided with a fine apartment and encouraged to visit the court whenever he wished. (The only obligation upon the comfort-loving composer was to don the much-despised full dress for dinner.) At a concert in March 1891, he heard a performance of Weber’s F minor clarinet concerto by the orchestra’s principal player of that instrument, Richard Mühlfeld, and
was overwhelmed. So strong was the impact of the experience that Brahms was shaken out of a year-long creative lethargy, and the Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, op. 114, and Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 115, were composed for Mühlfeld without difficulty between May and July 1891 at the Austrian resort town of Bad Ischl, near Salzburg. Three years later, Brahms produced the two sonatas for clarinet and piano, op. 120, for Mühlfeld. Both the trio and the quintet were first heard at a private recital at Meiningen on November 24, 1891, presented by Brahms (as pianist), Mühlfeld, and members of the Joachim Quartet. The same forces gave the public premieres of both works in Berlin on December 12.
Both the trio and the quintet that Brahms devised for Mühlfeld are autumnal in mood, tinged throughout with the bittersweet nostalgia that marked the music of the composer’s full maturity, a quality to which the darkly limpid sonority of the clarinet is perfectly suited.
this page : Johannes Brahms, cabinet card photograph by Fritz Luckhardt (1833–1894), ca. 1885. Vienna, Austria | opposite page, from top : The Meiningen Court Orchestra with its music director (1880–85) Hans von Bülow (1830–1894), the composer’s friend and collaborator, 1882. Meiningen Museums, Germany. Brahms premiered his Fourth Symphony with the ensemble on October 25, 1885. | Meiningen, Germany, between 1890 and 1905. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photochrom Prints Collection
The trio’s opening movement, a seamlessly woven sonata form that treats the two melody instruments as twin voices, begins with a somber main theme that arches through the cello’s tenor register. The ensemble’s discussion of this motif leads to a climax from which emerges the second theme, a lyrical cello melody that, reversing the shape of the main theme, descends then rises. The compact development section, based on the main subject, is draped with ribbons
of scales passed among the participants. The themes are somewhat altered on their returns in the recapitulation, and the movement ends with a whispered reminiscence of the scales from the development. The Adagio is a tender, introspective duet with piano accompaniment that makes superb use of the burnished hues of clarinet and cello. The third movement takes a graceful, languid, waltzlike strain as its principal theme and creates contrast with a rustic episode in the manner of the countryside ländler. The main theme of the sonata-form finale, initiated by the cello, comprises bold phrases of leaping intervals followed by a tight, scale-step motif; the contrasting subsidiary subject is more flowing. The development section is dominated by the impetuous main theme. The trio concludes with the recapitulation of the finale’s themes and a brilliant coda grown from the principal subject.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
